This is a post about the worst DVD feature I’ve ever seen and general carping about mishandling of TV shows in their original run or their release to DVD.

As mentioned before, I’ve been listening to The Drew Carey Show and Spin City while at work and doing chores. Each of these two shows has done things to aggravate me.

Neither show has been fully released on DVD due to ABC’s early preference for Best Of collections rather than season releases. They have release the first season of The Drew Carey Show and more may be to come, though I’ve heard no plans from Spin City. This type of thing annoys me, but having gone into that I’ll move on to fresh annoyances.

Spin City has the worst DVD feature I have ever seen. I don’t generally expect a whole lot from DVD releases, but I usually ask that they don’t decrease my enjoyment of the overall product as Spin City does. At the opening of each episode, Michael J Fox talks about the episode. Sounds cool except that Fox apparently doesn’t have anything of value to add, so instead almost all of them go like this:

“Bill [Lawrence, co-producer] came to me with this idea where the Mayor and my character would [fill in blank] and then the press/city workers/activists would [fill in blank]. So then we would [fill in blank], but then [fill in blank] happened, which was really funny. The funniest scene is [fill in blank] and my favorite part of the show is when [see funny scene just mentioned].”

So not only do I have next to no additional information that I would not have gleaned from watching (or listening to) the episode, but half of the gags have been expressly mentioned and every plot twist is exposed. In the handful of episodes off the DVDs that I’ve scene, about the only worthwhile thing he had to say was that he and Barry Bostwick (who plays the mayor) actually jumped into the Hudson in a scene where his characters did so and that they had to wear plugs on every orifice to avoid exposure to something nasty. The other dozen or so just told me exactly what was going to happen and half-ruined it.

On to Drew Carey.

ABC signed The Drew Carey Show to a three year extension when it was still popular in the sixth season while Drew and Kate O’Brien were finally an on-again-off-again item. After that subplot ran cold (their break-up handled so much better than Mike and Nicki’s) and after a couple timeslot changes, the show’s popularity plummeted. The actress for Kate O’Brien left the show to be a mommy and to appear part time in her husband’s (Bill Lawrence, incidentally) new show, Scrubs. Though they handled the transition to the Kellie Newmark character (played by Libby from Lost and the girlfriend from Titus) well, by the time they got to the ninth season not enough people were watching to warrant a timeslot.

ABC elected to run the program over the summer, two episodes at a time, just to fill the contractual obligations. I can recognize the position that they were in, but for some bizarre reason they ran the entire season out of order. The first episode of the last season, they had a “previously on The Drew Carey Show” with flashbacks to scenes that hadn’t yet aired, giving away half the season’s jarring events in the first thirty seconds of the first episode of the season. TV is a business and I can understand why they couldn’t give it a timeslot, but did they really have to extend their middle finger to those that still liked the show?