I'm surprised there's not already a thread on this. This show had to be the western on the verge of a new century show ever. I mean come on, it had Bruce Campbell! Uh...that was Bruce Campbell right?

It had everything:
The sarcastic sidekick bounty hunter
The hooker with the heart of gold
The inventor with the wacky yet useful inventions
The futuristic bad guy
The ever loyal horse

*edited to correct spelling*

Sadly, almost no one from this show went on to greater things (although plenty went on to show up in The Pretender or assorted guest spots on various Trek series). Bruce Campbell rules, of course, and Kelly Rutherford still pops up here and there. Not so much with the other principals.

Creator Carlton Cuse is now a producer on Lost. And M.C. Gainey, who was on Brisco County a couple of times, now plays Zeke the Beardless on that show. Coincidence? I think n--yeah, it's a coincidence.

Ha! Maybe everything strange that happens on Lost can be explained by the Orb.

Now that The Muppet Show and The Adventures of Pete & Pete have (started to) come out on DVD, this is the one show that I must have. I've heard rumors that 2006 will finally be the year, but I've been let down before.

Best FOX show ever. It's mostly been downhill since then.

I stumbled across this show years ago (in Australia) when it was the last episode to be shown. Have waited in vain ever since for it to come on again (unless it's been on again and I missed it because it was on at some ungodly hour of the morning).

If Fox made it, it may turn up on Fox8 on Foxtel (PayTV) sometime.

The TVShowsonDVD news page on this series says that there is a good chance it'll be on DVD this summer. Apparently they're supposed to have shot bonus material in January. Let's hope this pans out!

And TVShowsOnDVD is now having a poll to help choose the set cover art!

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/brisco

Maybe it'll finally happen!

I read about it on Bruce Campbell's website. I will most definitely be getting this one on DVD.

But I have to admit that it was nice to hear that the theme is still being used by NBC Sports, I last heard it during the Olympics.

And because I have to: Fox you suck!

Oh, I hope so! crosses fingers
BTW, I voted for the one on the left.

Which one? They change positions as you reload the page. I voted for the one that shows Bruce holding a gun and not just his big head. That head one kinda scared me.

(And, no, before you ask, I didn't find that out by voting multiple times. I couldn't recall which one was on the left so I went to see which one amityisland had voted for and saw the big head cover on the left. Not imagining that anyone could vote for such an ugly cover, I reloaded a few times and saw them change.





I don't know why I'm telling y'all this. Like you care. I guess I'm just so giddy at the prospect of this series finally coming out!)

Stupid mismatched tags!

I also voted for the Brisco-with-gun-in-front-of-montage cover. But whichever one it is , it'll be fine by me!

The only reason I ever started watching X-Files was because it was on after Brisco County. Once again, Fox took a lovely Friday night line-up and killed it. Bastards.

Christian Clemenson was recently on Boston Legal, and Billy Drago is definitely in the "Hey! It's That Guy" department. Whenever I see Clemenson, I still think of him as Socrates.

I wonder if there'd be any way to just buy the first half of the series.

You know, the good half.

i dont know why i always got this show confused with remo williams. i guess they both had ridiculous names.

Yeah. Before the whole story got changed.

Brisco County Jr. is a perfect example of how America needs to embrace the 10 episodes and out school of television. This show would've been perfect for 10 eps then ended the arc. If they wanted to do a second series, maybe Brisco could be the mayor of a town or something and have new secondary characters.

I was surprised and pleased to see that Brisco County is on the line-up for the new AOL TV-on-Demand thingie In2TV -- http://television.aol.com/in2tv.

You can watch them, for free, legally! Hooray.

:)

yeah, I voted for the non-big head one too.

We now have release date, price, extras, and official (non big-head) cover art. All info here.

$100? Oy, better start saving those pennies. Wish there were more commentaries, too; most of those extras don't interest me much at all.

Oh my Lord, I absolutely adored this show when it first came on, to the point where Bruce Campbell was my first ever (and most enduring to this day) adolescent crush . I was too young when the Evil Dead series first hit to watch it, so for a long time, I only knew him from this series. I still wonder to this day why the X-Files was picked up and this wasn’t. It could have gone in so many different but good directions, especially after the whole Orb was destroyed and they had a chance to start over.

I will say the 2nd to 3 ½ seasons weren’t the best, but compared to all the rest of the crap on t.v. it was pretty damn good. You’d think I would’ve learned from the cancellation of this as far as the Friday Night Timeslot of Death goes on Fox, but literally a decade later I was still cursing Fox when Firefly disappeared (and don’t even get me started on wishing someone would do a Brisco/Firefly crossover fanfic with the Orb tossing the Brisco folks into the future with the Firefly crew. Yeah, I’m that nerdy, ahem).

I never get why some shows' individual season sets are around the 35 - 40 dollar mark (Quantum Leap, Buffy, etc) and why some are 100 dollars are more ( I'm looking at you, Star Trek). Just bugs me.

Oh well, who am I kidding, I'm still buying it.

$100? Damn. Forty or even $50 I could possibly handle, but $100? It'll have to go on my "Family, If You Love Me, One of Ya'll Will Get Me This For X-Mas" list. Or something after X-mas with cash from said family. It had better have some outstanding extras on it. Unlike the bare bones Space: Above and Beyond set from Best Buy. Perhaps Costco will have it pretty cheap.

In my opinion, it doesn't. The only extra that sounds interesting to me is the pilot episode commentary by Bruce and Carlton Cuse. I'd gladly pay $100 if Bruce did commentaries on even just half of the eps. As it is, I'll still pay the $100, but I'm gonna bitch about it.

If it costs $100, it will never be bought by anyone in my household. If it were less than 50, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

I just rented the first disc of this series, and the pilot (and the commentary) is pretty great. Aside from that...eh. I can't really get into it anymore. I find it kind of amusing, but some of the acting is horrid, and the mythology seems all over the place (admittedly, only four episodes in). I'm glad I rented - $100 is a lot to spend to realize something's not as good as you remember.

I tend to agree with those weaknesses, but I still loved the show. I couldn't take my eyes off Dixie, but it wasn't because of her acting, which I always thought was atrocious. In the commentary, Cuse admits that he never really figured out what the orbs were, even in his own mind, so it's not surprising that the mythology wandered. Of course, this was before shows had five-year plans and bibles and podcasts and Internet fan groups filling in whatever backstory the show hasn't provided. They wrote an episode and got it on film, and if they were still working the next week, they did it all again.

I've only seen the first disc so far, but I remember watching the original series and groaning a lot at the post-Bly episodes -- and not always in a good way -- especially when the Elvis character came along. The football episode with Terry Bradshaw, on the other hand, was so cheesy it went beyond bad and hit good again. (A recapper on this site once wrote about cheese being like multiplying negative numbers: if a show has two cheesy qualities, they cancel each other out, but if you add a third, it's cheesy again, or something like that. I've forgotten who wrote it, and wish I could find it back.)

Weaknesses aside, though, I think I'll still laugh at the first Pete's Piece exchange, no matter how many times I see it:

Pete Hutter could have made the show worth watching all by himself, even without the awesomeness of Brisco, Bly, Bowler, Socrates, Wickwire, and Comet.

A couple interesting things that I'd completely forgotten since the original run of the show: Brisco and Dixie sleep together the first chance they get. I remembered it as a typical will-they-won't-they TV attraction. Also, I had no idea that Brisco never shot anyone. I'd also agree that the pilot's commentary is great: the perfect mix of behind-the-scenes technical stuff and nostalgic chat. I was also amazed at how well the guys remembered the show after 10+ years. You could tell it really meant a lot to them.

One really cool thing about this show is that I've shown the pilot to a few people with very different tastes in TV shows, and they all loved it. I think you have to be fairly quick to pick up on all the jokes, but other than that, you don't have to be a fan of a particular genre to enjoy it. A lot of successful shows had shaky first seasons. It's a shame Brisco didn't get a second season to figure out where it was going.

Sale on the DVDs at amazon.

While I didn't love this show, I enjoyed what I remember seeing.

I loved this show as a kid but I agree that it doesn't really hold up as well all these years later. Some episodes are great but there are a few so far that are pretty bad. I have watched the first few discs so far and the one where his dad's ghost helps him find the kidnapped kid is boring as hell, although the one where he goes back to his hometown a few episodes later is great. Plus that episode had Sol Star from Deadwood in it and Briscoe and Bowler acting like cops (Briscoe pulling over horse racers and giving them a sobriety test, and Bowler dealing with a domestic dispute). Across the board I think the entire series would have been just terrible if not for Bruce Campbell.

Doesn't that pretty much describe about half of his career?

I absolutely love this show!!! I am slightly annoyed, however, that the DVD set put the shows in the wrong order. If you watch them one after another on the dvd, Pete dies in one episode, comes back in the next and no one thinks anything of it, THEN in the next, it's explained why he isn't dead. Kind of confusing if you don't know what you're doing. So I put a little note in my dvd set for whoever borrows it, it reads "Watch in this order for optimal Brisco enjoyment."

The best episode for me had to be Pirates! Because I love Brisco, and I love Pirates...how could you go wrong!??!?!

Long live Pete Hutter!!!! Every once in a while I find myself busting out with "She'll be coming round the mountain" a la Pete.

My fave line, and the one that hooked me into the show was, "existential thought doesn't hold much weight out here in the territories" in response to Dixie saying that Brisco was 'Somebody.'

Possibly. Having seen McHale's navy and episodes of Hercules and Jack of All Trades, I have to say that much of the other half was composed of material that was STILL terrible despite his presence.

The piece of dung that was Tornado was on recently, supporting this hypothesis.

As for Pete Hutter quotes, I often look forward to saying "Now ventilated for desert riding."

Oh come on! I enjoyed Tornado much more than Twister! Movies like this are in the Roger Corman school of film....rip 'em off and rip 'em off quick. Bruce was cheese-tastic in that movie.

Not saying it's GOOD...but it was one of the better ones for plot and acting. NOW....Screaming Brain on the other hand.....that was just hilariously bad.

Time to go back and revisit my Pete Hutter love...ain't that riiight, Brrrrrisco?

It's been a while since I watched any Brisco episodes, but didn't Pete Hutter die and come back without explanation several times? I seem to recall it was kind of a running gag on the show.

Or am I misremembering?

There was his getting "gut shot" in the pilot, then the joke didn't come back again until the last couple episodes, with his supposedly getting killed by a shuriken and a pitchfork.

I'd forgotten about the running gag about killing Pete and not commenting when he showed up again (Kenny anyone?). I started showing Brisco to my kids (who are loving it) and my 6 year old kept asking "Didn't he just get killed?" Now to try to explain it to him.

I too am renting the disks so I haven't made it all the way through the serious yet. Pete's probably my favorite character, after Brisco of course. Not only was he shot in the pilot, didn't he also drown in quicksand?

No, Pete didn't drown in quicksand. That was the Captain of the Pirates in the "Pirates" episode. Brisco tried to pull him out, the Captain tried to pull Brisco in, Bowler got Brisco out, but the Captain drowned.

The Pete Hutter thing just for laughs. I wonder is Carlton Cuse is borrowing a page from that for Patchy/Mikhail on Lost.

I hadn't seen Brisco since gorram Fox cancelled it 13 years ago, but I just recently started rewatching thanks to Netflix. It really is as good as I remember. (Which means I'm going to have to save up enough to buy it, dammit!)

One thing I didn't remember was Pete. I love and adore Pete. He gets the most wonderful, convoluted, full of big words speeches. "Sorry Dixie, existential thought doesn't hold much water out here in the territories." As much as I love Brisco, I would've totally watched a show solely about Pete's misadventures.

I recently watched the series again on dvd, and I got a laugh out of spotting Carlton doing a cameo in one of the eps. Pre-Lost I never would have noticed him.

There's also Sam Anderson and MC Gainey at parts. Not to mention a very young Mercedes McNab playing a rather different character from Harmony. This is a pretty neat show for recognizing future genre stars.

I have been working my way through the dvds and I will say with one more to go that the episodes get better as the series goes on. It seems that the writers figured out how to tell the story and the actors all really started working well together. I am on Disc 6 and Stagecoach and Wildcard are both excellent.

On a different note regarding Dixie, did it bother anyone else that Brisco's girlfriend was involved with at least 2 of the men that killed his father? Obviously people can change but I am not sure that is something I could get over if it was me.

Half the time I was hoping they would get together, and other times I hoped he'd steer clear of that walking venereal disease. I think the writers were also torn as to what to do with her.

I actually wasn't a very big Dixie fan. I much preferred the girl in the town he grew up in (I think). She was in one episode when Brisco came to town to help her dad, and I think her dad had kind of raised him, and they had grown up together, and of course sparks flew...I really wish we had seen her again. She seemed cool and not as ditzy or "helpless women" as Dixie could seem sometimes (although, only sometimes).

Dixie did seem to get around the Old West. I mean she seemed to be with a new guy everytime she was on. (not that Brisco himself didn't have his share of ladies). So the fact that she had seemed to have been with a lot of guys combined with the fact that at least 2 of John Bly's gang (although it wouldn't surprise me if she had been involved with more than Big Smith and Doc McCoy(those guys murdered his father, how is that not a dealbreaker?), and her with Bly himself wouldn’t surprise me) makes me wonder what exactly Brisco saw in her. I mean she was pretty but so was pretty much every woman Brisco met on his weekly adventures. Plus personally I always thought she had a really masculine voice.

Or at least an episode or two. When he first shows up in the pilot, critiquing the artist's boulder painting, that's when the laughs really start. And the whole bit about touching Pete's piece is just brilliant. My favorite Pete quote has to be from the pilot:

I liked Dixie myself, but I never liked her much with Brisco, if that makes sense. I mean, she's hotter than a firecracker, but I never thought they had that much chemistry together. (The show's creators thought just the opposite; they didn't originally intend to keep throwing them together, but they couldn't resist.) Their banter always seemed a little too cheesy to me (or not cheesy enough?) and forced somehow. And honestly, I could never figure out if Kelly Rutherford's acting and line-readings were really that bad, or if she was doing an over-the-top Mae West.

I just got my girlfriend the DVD set for her birthday. How awesome is that: a girlfriend who loves this show as soon as you introduce her to it that she asks for it as a gift? If she takes to Magnum p.i. this well, she's a keeper for sure.

Yeah I thought Brisco had better chemistry with Amanda from the pilot—and she was intended for the love interest—but the producers thought Dixie was better (I've only watched the first two discs, so my opinion is subject to change). That said, like someone mentioned upthread, I do find it a refreshing change of pace that they sleep together as soon as possible in contrast to say one of the producer's current shows on TV.

Oh, right. I just started watching this show and I love the awesomeness of Brisco County, Jr. It is just way too much fun. Combine this with Evil Dead (the first, dammit, though the second and third ones are good too) and some of his other movies—not to mention the prominent chin autobiography—and I really wish this guy got some higher profiles roles though I'm glad he's happy with what he does.

ETA: Any other West Wing fans on the thread? Not only are there pirates but there's Donna! (Janel Moloney).