Best Show Debut:
TWW: Not only does it clue you into the staffers' outside life (remember that was the goal of the show at the beginning) but it also avoided showing the President until the end. I like MS's better role in the show to come, but it was nicer when they focused on the staffers' non-lives.

Freaks and Geeks: A great beginning to a great show. Right before the credits you have the popular kids forgotten, the freaks under the bleacher and the geeks doing Bill Murray impersonations (that's genius in my book).

Worst Show Debut:
Buffy: I don't even like to watch this episode in reruns. The only thing it has going for it in hindsight is that the damsel in distress in the beginning isn't in distress.

Best Character Debut:
CJ falling on the treadmill, remember when she used to do those kind of things.
Rachel in a wedding dress
Lindsay saying high school sucks

Worst character debut:
Sam on ER this season

Best :

Felicity : I was hooked after the first minute. Hell I was hooked after seing the preview of this show with the Madonna's song in the backgroung. I could so relate to Felicity: may be because I was starting college and was in premed like her. Never in my life was I so gripped by a pilot.

Alias had an amazing start with zero commercial and a backward story. I was hooked. That was something. I rewatched the pilot 3 times and I still think it's amazing.

Twin Peak: what a beginning! After the first 15 minutes I so wanted to know who had killed Laura Palmer. It obsessed me for weeks.

worst

Seinfeld pilot was very bad and not that funny. They didn't have Elaine in the show. I didn't watch when it first air but when I see it, I always feel it's missing something.

One of my favorite debut shows is for Tribeca. I was all ready to enjoy the series - and then there wasn't one. :(

I also liked the debut for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Captain Sisko thought aliens were torturing him by repeatedly showing him his wife's death. At the end, the aliens learned to communicate with him and the first thing they asked is "why do you exist here?". It turns out that they were only showing him his own obsession. He was taking them (and himself) back to that moment. They weren't showing him anything. I liked this ep because Sci-fi tends to be more "Action-Alien Invasion" and less "Grief and Personal Relationships", but this ep tied them together very well.

Word, my jaw was on the floor for all three of Connor's entrances, but his birth was one of the best tv moments ever for me.

Even though Buffy's debut probably wouldn't make my short list for tv's best, I loved it. Of course, I was hooked on the show from the first time I saw the preview commercial for it. The movie was just okay, but I loved the concept and I was so happy to see that the ad had a different look and tone. I danced around my living room and set my vcr right then.

Now, for the best debut, I have to agree with Jess when he posted this:



Man, looking into Mia Kirshner's big, innocent eyes and thinking that she was going to get used and killed by that cold, devious assassin and then realizing that she was the cold, devious assassin was awesome.

Funniest debut was Louie in Taxi. When he stepped out of the cage and was eye to naval with Bobby (or Alex, I can't remember), I just about died laughing.

Now and Again had one of the best opening sequences ever. A bell tolls in the background as a little Asian man boards a Tokyo subway train. The bell goes on, and you realize it's "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC. The man--The Eggman--sits on the train, cradling a paper bag in his lap, making funny faces at one of the kids sitting opposite him. The train stops; the Eggman gets off, leaving his bag behind, open on the seat. Three eggs roll out of the bag. The train moves on, and one of the bags rolls off the street and cracks open. Suddenly, one of the passengers realizes she's bleeding from her effing eyes. It spreads fast. When the train pulls into the next station, the interior is covered with bloody handprints. And this is all before the credit sequence, mind you; ten minutes in, they still hadn't named the show. Wow.

I agree. And I had no intention of being into the show prior to that, I just saw that first episode and it was ten times better than I thought it would be. I had given up judging shows by their pilots because so many good shows have some pretty mediocre pilots. But the pilot of Alias is one of my favorite episodes of the show (I've probably seen it a dozen times), I can't think of another show where the first episode is among my favorites of the series.

Ahh! Shoppinggirl beat me to it. Seriously, if you watch the first episode of N/T you will be hooked. period.

Best Trek First Episode: (which makes it ironic on how crappy it ended up)
Voyager's 'The Caretaker', great set-up, great story, tight and interesting plot.... then all went down to hell.

Czeri, I agree with you on the Oz first episode (surprise, surprise). But I'll see your O'Reily and raise you one Schillinger.

While Ryan's mendacity was impressive, it was also on display immediately, from the moment he showed up on screen. On the other hand, Vern came off like a really nice guy at first...right up until he uttered that immortal phrase, "Now, Tobias, your ass is mine," followed by the unforgettable, uh, application of the swastika to the aforementioned ass.

My admiration for J.K. Simmons is unrivalled.



Well, yeah, there is that one. But I got a late start on Oz and only had the Season One DVDs at first. I was introduced to Keller as he sat smouldering behind his Death Row bars in Season 666. I wasn't able to fully appreciate him until I got the Season 2 DVDs.

Opening scene of the pilot for MILLENNIUM: a moody loner type walks into a peep show and sits down in one of the booths. The window pops open on a girl who starts dancing -- to "Hey Pig" by Nine Inch Nails. As the song goes on and she keeps dancing, the moody loner starts muttering to himself, the muttering gradually gets louder and louder, and then you realize he is reciting "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats ("Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned...") He contines to recite, she continues to dance, he scribbles words to the poem on a piece of paper and then starts hallucinating that blood is dripping down the walls inside the booth where the girl's dancing -- and then it IS, because she's experiencing some weird supernatural attack, all while "Hey Pig" is underscoring the whole scene.

Cut to opening credits, cue Mark Snow.

One of the few times Chris Carter made my brain explode in a GOOD way. All the more so because I am a slavish fan of the work of Yeats, and for a while ran with a crowd that went to a strip show to which one of the highlight acts was indeed performed to "Hey Pig."

I'm going to go back to Smallville here. Even if you forget the HoYay! Clark's debut is in a spaceship surrounded by meteors that destroy the town and make pancakes. The pilot had just the right balance of squeaky clean Superman nostalgia and dark twisted underpinnings and I still think it was one of the show's best episodes.

I don't watch many new show premiers, since I usually wait to hear if the buzz is good (though I regret waiting for Gilmore Girls, I grant you). But one show that hooked me from day one was Cheers. I still remember what room I was in and what the night was like when I watched it. I just loved the snappy dialog, funny but desperate characters, and it didn't hurt that Ted Danson looked like an ex-boyfriend. I didn't stay with the show to the bitter end, but I did stick with it for quite a while. Hate Frazier though.

Best debut? Had to be the X-Files pilot episode. I was hooked from the moment Mulder hopped out of the car and spray painted a giant X on the highway! Classic weird Mulder moment!

I didn't really have any expectations for Everwood. The premise and commercials made it seem so cliched--dead spouse, alienated from children, and moving to a new town. It even opened with a narrator filling telling us the backstory. The first forty-five minutes were pretty good but there wasn't anything exceptional about it that would have made me watch it every week. But then came that now infamous Andy/Ephram fight in the street.

"You BASTARD!"

"I wish YOU had died instead of her!"

And I fell in love.

I totally agree. I don't know why I ever watched the first episode, but I've never missed one since, and even watch the easy-views on Sunday.

One of my favorite character introductions has to our very first glimpse of Martin Sheen at the end of the premiere for The West Wing. Although POTUS is talked about a lot during the show, we don't actually see him until he walks in quoting the 1st commandment during a theological argument in the last ten minutes. Has there ever been a better first line than: "I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me."? After a frenetic fifty minutes, suddenly it was like "daddy's home" and everything just ran better after that.

One of the best, I think, was the pilot of "King of the Hill." I was all grumbly about it, because I hated Beavis and Butthead. But I'm a cartoon slut, so I tuned in just to gripe about how much it was going to suck. And it ended up being so... sweet. And funny. Back before Peggy became a knowitall bitch. Hank was truly perplexed by Bobby, but he loved him anyway. It was great.

Here's a rhetorical question for all you old timers (or youngins who watch a lot of reruns): back in the early episodes of Happy Days, Fonzie was a minor character who wore a blue cotton jacket & rode a motorcycle. He was still a tough guy and all- but he was very much in the background. At what point did he suddenly become the most popular chacter on the show?

In terms of 'when did you start liking a character?'- Angel. I watched it from the beginning (because I was a fan of Buffy and was going through Forever Knight withdrawls)- but I didn't start liking Angel until the second or third ep. He was trying to help Kate the cop. She was trying to bust some big-time gangster guy. Gangster guy is out by the docks or something- waiting to do something illegal. Angel goes to spy on him. Kate isn't there and the gangster's about to leave. Angel realizes he needs to do something.

We cut to s shot of the gangster guy just standing there alone. Suddenly, he's joined by Angel, whose wearing a goofy shirt, white fishing hat and talking in a lame-o voice asking if this was the place where he could catch the ferry. He engages the guy in conversation for a bit (thereby stalling him), but ends up knocking him out.

I became a Boreanez fan right there & then.

I think the pilot for "Twin Peaks" was the best TV debut of all time.

The worst? I don't think I could narrow it down to a few. I remember being really disappointed by the Beverly Hills 90210 debut, but then it went on to be a monster hit.

Blue jacket Fonzie was the first season (and I think Happy Days was a mid-season replacement so it wasn't a full season). The viewers liked him so much that Chuck Cunningham disappeared and the leather jacket showed up in the second (first full) season.

Worst ever premiere: I have to agree that it was the train wreck of Chevy Chase's talk show. Horrible, horrible show. My husband and I still talk about how awful it was.

This might get me blasted and it might not even qualify as "best" even for me, but the premiere episode of Roseanne was hysterical.

Maybe it was because I had seen her stand-up routines and was totally unimpressed and really didn't want to watch the show. I don't remember why I did [nothing else on?], but I was glad I did. What didn't work as a stand-up [to me] totally worked when we got to see the family reactions.

Roseanne's stand-up was caustic and abrasive. She put down her kids and husband and family-life in general. What you got to see on the sitcom was the underlying love and that her family knew she loved them. And you saw that they could give it back and that Roseanne could take as well as she could give.

So, maybe it's not the best, but it certainly was a shocker for me. And it was very funny, too.

Thanks, gnbhull! I watched the show as a kid in primetime but not until the second season. Upon viewing reruns of the first season years later I was struck by how much in the background the celebrated Mr Fonzerelli had been in the early days.

I remember being bombarded with promos before it debuted. I expected it to be a typical soapy drama, and thought Ephram was going to be the typical snotty teen that everyone would hate before the first episode ended.

I have never been wronger in my life. Gregory Smith's amazing acting abilities and the fabulous writing made him the most endearing character ever to appear on my television set. The rest of the show is great too; fantastic acting, writing choices that rise above the cliche nearly every time, but Ephram is a wonder to behold. I wish I was 16 so I could have a crush on him.

Heh. No need to restrain yourself. No one else does.

I agree that Everwood had an exceptionally strong pilot. It's interesting to see how they set up expectations for certain characters and completely shot them to hell later on.

My vote for worst debut goes to the pilot for Babylon 5. I was so turned off by it, particularly by the "acting" is some scenes, that I didn't watch another episode until after the show was cancelled. Of course that means I almost missed out on what I now consider to be the best sci-fi show ever. Damned pilot episode...

Oh, how I loved that show from the first minute. Oh, yes, I did.

Alias hooked me from the first minute, too. Shower sex, dental torture, magenta hair, daddy issues, betrayed college student/spy - that was some awesome TV.

I don't know if I'd call The O.C.'s premiere a best, but it sure made me want to keep on watching.

I wouldn't call it worst, but the Sex and the City pilot is nowhere near at the quality of the subsequent episodes. I can't really explain it well, except that it just seems sort of amateurish and has a film-school-project-quality to it. And it's heavy on the people talking directly to camera bit that faded out after a few more episodes.

Best? I have to think some more about that...

Major word! That teaser was one long take that completely established the tone and direction of the entire series in like two minutes.

Hand to heart, the pilot of "SeaQuest DSV" was excellent. The less said about the rest of the series, the better.
Bad pilots? Well, Babylon 5 has already been mentioned. It was a perfect storm of lousy acting and clumsy exposition, so awful that executive producer re-edited it for video release. I was really looking forward to "Earth: Final Conflict" until I saw a few minutes of the pilot.

How about Harsh Realm for a great debut? I don't suppose we'll be seeing much more of Scott Bairstow for a long time.

There was this Fox sci-fi series that premiered about a decade ago called VR.5. I remember being blown away by the first episode. I only saw it that once, but I sometimes wonder if it was as good as I remember it. That first episode was amazing, but then I remember thinking the second episode was only "meh" and by the third episode it completely blew chunks.

The Powers that Be was a sitcom I had tremendous love for, and the only series (luckily) I can remember that I really loved that got cancelled. Thought it was brilliant from the first episode (although to be fair it had lost steam by the end of its first and only season).

TWW got me with the first season finale, and then the second season premiere. It never reached those heights again, IMO.

The X-Files got me with the episode "Irresistible."

Band of Brothers got me with "Day of Days." I liked the first episode, but it was the second episode opening: the shot of the clouds, and then you see the lights flashing and what sounds like thunder, and you realize it's not a lightning storm...it's the beach at Normandy under those clouds, invasion in progress. And then what happens next...phew. IMO that hour, with the landings and then the attack on the German garrison are better than the much-ballyhooed opening of Saving Private Ryan.

Best Show Debuts: Wonderfalls. It made me fall in love with the show. Before.. death.
I bought the first season of Alias on DVD, and was shocked by how awesome the first episode was. The gory death in the first episode! Awesome.

Worst Show Debuts: Tru Calling. I rewatched it a week or so ago, and... horror. I haven't appreciated how much they've cut back on the flashbacks, I thought they were bad, but before they were really bad. And the running! The running! Horrible. Granted, I still don't like the show but... season finale... Jason Priestly...

The two I came on here to mention have already been talked about. My vote for my favorites is Alias, When Sydney was tied up in the chair and did that awesome flip, I was hooked, had no clue what was going on, but it was still very cool. My other favorite was 24, after thr hour was up, my mom and I just looked at each other and we were like "wow" and we've been watching it every week since.

Another vote for the terribleness of early Babylon 5. I got hooked on the show midway through season 2, and when I got to go back and see early season 1, there was much cringing involved.

The pilot for The Sopranos blew me away. At the ned of it, I turned to my husband and used the words "one of the best hours of television...ever" drama, dark comedy, and it was written on so many different levels

These were mentioned already, but I'm gonna go with 24 and Freaks and Geeks. When Mia Kirshner started to go all Commando, I was like, "Wait, what? What the fuck is she doing?? Maybe she's a CTU agent and she's gonna dive out and save the senator and....is that a bomb??". Sigh. I miss my NakedMandy.

And I would put the Freaks and Geeks pilot up there as one of my favorite episodes of any show ever. It's almost like a 40 minute movie, and it has so many great moments: The teaser, with the camera abandoning the jock & cheerleader, and diving under the bleachers to the tune of "Runnin' With the Devil", then panning over to Lindsay somewhere between the freaks and the geeks. Plus, the Kim Kelly "I think you want to kiss me" scene, Lindsay's grandmother speech, and of course, the "Come Sail Away" homecoming dance. My, uh, "allergies" are kicking up thinking about it. Actually, every scene in that episode is good.

The Alias pilot is good too, but upon rewatch, I think it tends to drag in some parts. Also, I hated that dumbass fiance and I laugh every time I watch SpyDaddy delivering the smackdown over the phone.

Re: Connor, yeah, both his birth and return from Quor-toth were awesome. I saw "Heartthrob" for the first time about 3 months ago, so I wasn't all that shocked to see Julie Benz's pregnant belly.

Edited because a senator isn't the same as a president

The indroduction of Nadia (Derevko?) on Alias was one of the best I've ever seen. All of the characters are setting up thier own expectations of who Nadia will be: the two most important prejudices are that Syd thinks she (Nadia) is something of an innocent bystander, and Jack sees her as a huge potential threat to Syd, being the daughter of Irina Derevko and Arvin Sloane, two of the three most ruthless characters on the show.

So Syd finds Nadia in a Chechnyan work camp, under an assumed name, comatose. As Syd wheels Nadia out of the camp, she gets attacked and outnumbered by guards. Theres is a quick cut of Nadia looking around lethargically in the middle of the fight, but it seems that the importance of the shot is that it reinforces Nadia's helplessness. Then, as Syd is losing the fight, out of nowhere, a guard gets beaned by a fire extinguisher and falls, revealing Nadia, wielding the extinguisher.

Best Character Introduction - Paris on Gilmore Girls in Rory's Dance, first season. I only started watching the show that December and hadn't seen the first eight episodes, and felt right off the bat this was Paris' real introduction to the audience. Gone was the token 'bully' figure before then, and in her place was a girl with insecurities and issues up the wazoo that you just wanted to give a hug to because the guy she loves (Tristan) doesn't even acknowledge she exists, she has to take her cousin in his place, and she mistakes the intentions of a new classmate (Rory) who just wants to be her friend. Plus that episode intoduced me to Liza Weil, a very kick-ass actress who is one of the best of our generation and plays a 19 year-old in a 26 year-old's body so believably you're shocked at her real age.

Worst Character Introduction - Anyone on Ally McBeal during seasons four and five, especially Maddy. She got on my nerves and the fact that her New York-moving allergies ruined what should've been set up as a happy John/Ally finale still piss me off to this day.

Best Pilot - X-Play. Yes, it's a video game show, but from the beginning Morgan and Adam made it clear that they weren't going easy on publishers or taking things so seriously the whole show would be boring, they have some of the best chemistry on a reviewing show I've ever seem. I was won over by Morgan's fake out of a Batman game review, where she gave it a five before she went on to show us why it really deserved a 1 out of five instead.

Worst Pilot - The Daily Show back in 1997, when Craig Kilborn was hosting. I still remember there was no studio audience, lots of jokes that fell flat and the news was read pretty much cold, three people on the staff laughing the entire time in a HA! HA! HA! manner, and Craig's over-macho attitude before they overhauled it and gave the reins to Jon Stewart. I stuck with it despite because there wasn't a satirical news show that appealed to me so much before then.

Chappelle's Show...blind Black White-Supremacist...

RubbaBandMan big word. I have been a fan ever since.

I also loved Nip/Tuck's premiere. Rowdy sex and murder all in the pilot. I have been hooked and can't wait til June for new episodes.

I'd have to say my favorite first episode is the pilot for ER. Awesome. Fast pace, excellent cinematography, good characters. Too bad it sucks now. I stopped watching the day Romano's arm got chopped off by the evil helicopter that later killed him. By falling on top of him.

The show that I thought I would hate, but later grew on me is The O.C. All summer long, the Canadian channel that carries it was promoting it heavily. Like, every single commercial break had an ad for The O.C. The end credits for every single broadcast show featured even more promos. The stupid thing about it was that even with all the hype, no one had any idea what the show was about. They would play some hard rock/alternative-type music and show Ryan at a party, in a fistfight, in jail, at another party, smooching a girl, in jail again, and then a shot of a fancy poolhouse. Then, there would be a melodramatic voice-over: "The O.C. Coming soon." I thought it was about some troubled drug dealer, or young gambling addict or something.
Anyway, I happened to catch the third episode one night, and oh my God- it's the best show ever! Trashy, yes. But, it still rocks! I'm totally hooked. I can't go a week without it. It fills the void that was left in my heart when Melrose Place was cancelled. ;)
It's just interesting how much one's viewpoint can change...

The pilot ep of X-Files hooked me from the get-go...in fact, it made me run out and buy a VCR so I could start taping it in case it made it into re-runs. Even all these years later, I remember having that "WOW!" reaction to it. At the time, I'd never heard of Gillian Anderson and recognized Duchovny only as the cross-dressing DEA agent from Twin Peaks, but they had that spark of somethin' somethin' together right off the bat. So weird and instantly watchable.

Gotta echo those who pointed out the pilot of Freaks & Geeks as being stellar...I'm the same age as the characters, so I was finishing high school at the same time the show was set, and they got ALL the details exactly right, from the lame Murray impersonations to the bloated AOR rock ballads to the...I dunno, the attitude. It felt exactly like watching my own high school experiences from a third-person perspective. I even had Lindsay's green army surplus jacket! That first episode slammed me right back to '81 so well I didn't even find any anachronisms to nitpick...they got the sound right, the slang right, the clothes (shudder) right, the pop-cultural obsessions right -- all I could think was "Man, the producers and writers must have been in high school when I was, because they didn't miss a damn beat." The casting was phenomenal...not just Joe Flaherty (perfect!) but the various "types" of freeks/geeks, too. They managed to shorthand the typical early '80s high school "fringe student" mix brilliantly: snarky musician, impossibly pretty "cool" guy, romantic stoner, too-cool-for-school "bad" girl, smart girl who wants to be cool, uptight dorky band girl who doesn't know how uncool she is, sensitive Freshman with virtual "kick me" signs all over him, sarcastic pop-culture-obsessed "comic relief" short guy, and of course the walking disaster of adolescence gone awry that is Bill Haverchuck, the most realistic catastrophe of high school loserdom ever committed to film. It was so real it hurt, but in a good way. Best show about the '80s, ever. And that includes shows made IN the '80s.

Loved Homefront from the very beginning, too. The pilot ep set up the premise (small-town families adjusting to life after wartime) beautifully, and managed to introduce us to more than a dozen regular, interconnected characters without overwhelming us with detail. It had the sweet vibe of a '40s movie, the complexity of a nighttime soap without the predictability or dramatic cliches, and the savvy, sharp writing of a dramatic film. The acting didn't suck, either. I was an instant, avid fan of it.

I SO wanted to say Homefront, Vacationland, but I haven't seen the 90-minute pilot since it first aired. I was about nine at the time and so my memories are really dim, but I loved the show even then. When TVLand re-ran the show a few years ago, I didn't realize it immediately and so I missed seeing/taping a chunk of the early episodes. Having said that, considering how amazing the rest of the show is I can only imagine how terrific the pilot was. It's grown to such mythic statures in my mind (an hour and a half! My TV mouth waters.) that I think it must be the best debut ever, and I can barely remember it.

Does that sound crazy?

Why isn't that show on DVD? Didn't the pilot have one of the main characters (Kelly Rutherford's?) showing up at the train station to meet her fiance IN HER WEDDING DRESS only to find him...and his new English warbride?

Kick ass.

I believe that show is airing on the quasi-net Goodlife TV Network.

Crazy? Nahhh. Truly good TV product like that doesn't happen that often, so you go right ahead and put it on a pedistal.

Do you get GLTV network (Good Life TV)? It's part of my cable package, but YMMV. I happened across it while channel-surfing a while back and lo and behold -- regular re-runs of Homefront! They've played the entire series at least 3 times as far as I can tell, one episode a week (Wednesday?) that repeats on the following Monday. Including the (sadly edited for length) pilot ep...it's still pretty great, though. They also play the episodes in order (unlike ABC, which started shuffling episodes at the end of its original run), which means "The Lacemakers" episode is in the right place in the series for it to make dramatic sense. I loved the series in first run, but it's amazing how well it stands up a decade later. The writing and acting is still good, the stories still seem fresh and interesting, and it's kind of cool to realize that it's one of those shows that won't ever seem dated, since it was a period piece to begin with, and the art direction and dialogue was so exacting that it doesn't immediately bring the decade it was actually shot to mind (unlike many "historical" shows with anachronistic hair/makeup that smacks of whenever it's filmed).

That first episode was really a masterpiece of character introduction...you meet a character and see how they connect to another character (and so on, and so on), you get a nifty bit of characterization for each that's done so deftly you don't even appreciate it until you've seen the whole series and realize you knew just what Linda or Ginger or the Davises were all about in that first episode. The vignettes (Linda in her Rosie the Riveter work clothes, the imperious Sloanes condescending to the long-suffering Davises, earnest Jeff trying to shake off that "little brother" label, Regular Guy Vet Charlie already talking about starting a family with his sneaky, opportunistic War Bride Caroline) pretty much set up most of the long story arcs in the series. So yeah, even if you don't remember it perfectly, rest assured it was some damn good television!

Dana Girl, yes! Why isn't it on DVD?? I'd buy it in a heartbeat! And yes, one of the characters did show up at the train station in her wedding dress, ready to meet her returning fiance (who had neglected to mention that he'd married an English girl before coming home - OUCH!). However the character was Ginger Szabo (played by Tammy Lauren), not Kelly Rutherford's character, Judy (a Baseball Annie/femme fatale/bartender who later had designs on Ginger's eventual fiance, Jeff). Poor Ginger's eventual meeting with two-timing Charlie was great -- she was horrendously hung-over and girlfriend was seriously pissed off. Dang it, I want this show on DVD!

You are right. For some reason I always thought those two actresses looked somewhat alike. They didn't. Not even a bit.

I so wish I had that network. I'm going to email my cable company. I've always thought of Homefront as a really good book- and the pilot episode was the perfect opening chapter, like has been said, carefully revealing everyone's character and motivations and then beginning to weave the story.

"The Lacemakers" makes me cry. Years later.

ETA-Can't we petition Amazon or something? There's no reason why they can't put out this show.

Vacationland, thanks for the synopsis! It sounds awesome. Sadly, I don't get Good Life TV (goes into a corner and weeps softly). Bring on the DVDs!

Dana Girl, the woman in the wedding dress was probably Tammy Lauren (Ginger), as she was jilted for a war bride. Kelly Rutherford's character didn't appear until a while later in the series. In the last episode, Ginger's back at the train station in a wedding dress. Gotta love the continuity. Kick ass, indeed. :)

It would air for about six hours a day on an independent station. That's how I got my Bonanza fix before it started airing on TVLand.

Good Life TV?

Must NOT be a Fred Saberhagen fan, who ever named it.

Google on "fred saberhagen berserker" if this doesn't make sense, which if you are not a SF geek it might not.

Good Life is a pseudo-Odyssey kinda network. It has a little bit of religious programming...kinda like Odyssey, thus the comparison.

(Odyssey was the name of the Hallmark Channel before Hallmark took over)