It's Kind Of A Big TV Night —
And Here's One Way to Prepare

Tonight is probably my most anticipated night of the fall season. Ugly Betty, The Office, and Survivor all return, and those are all good shows.

Grey's Anatomy is back, too, and that's at least an interesting phenomenon. And while My Name Is Earl isn't something I watch consistently, Seth Green is dropping by for that show's return, so that can't be too bad.

Survivor doesn't require any catching up, since it starts fresh with every season, but if you need to catch up on anything else, Hulu can offer you the last few episodes of The Office and My Name Is Earl, while ABC has the last few Ugly Bettys streaming on its site. (That's a clip from the season finale of The Office at the top of the post.)

It's as good a time as any, I suppose, to mention that if you've never poked around at Hulu -- a News Corp.-NBC Universal streaming-video joint venture -- it's worth a look. In addition to clips and full episodes from lots of current shows (largely, but not entirely, from NBC and Fox), it offers movies, vintage TV shows and specials too. (It's the one place you can still see Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog free -- though supported by a few ads).

Buffy, David E. Kelley, football, and five great clips, after the jump...

I recently went back to Hulu and watched a few episodes of David E. Kelley's The Practice, just to convince myself that legal shows used to be more fun than they are now (I was right).

But the experience convinced me that Hulu is becoming an impressive resource for a lot of different things. If you're a Mainline-er, there are plenty of shows to be mainlined on Hulu, including Arrested Development (available in its entirety), Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the first two seasons are available so far), and the wonderful Friday Night Lights, which you still have time to watch the first two seasons of before the show returns to regular TV midseason. (This fall, it will air only on DirecTV, thanks to a weird cost-sharing arrangement that apparently helped keep the struggling show on the air.)

Hulu has also recently started carrying movies, and while the selection is spotty, there are some good ones available: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Ghostbusters, Sense And Sensibility and Hoop Dreams are all on the menu. (Again, these all involve periodic short commercial breaks.)

Consider: Hulu is one place to find legal Saturday Night Live clips, which isn't inconsequential, since they scrub them pretty carefully from YouTube:

Here, a clip from the very first Arrested Development ever:

And the explanation of the "slap bet," from How I Met Your Mother:

Or, after a trailer, the film Raising Arizona in its entirety:

Or the mudslide sequence from Romancing The Stone:

Bottom line: The world of legal streaming video continues to be a little hard to navigate, but the selections are steadily improving. You can kind of tell they're getting there with services like this -- though it'll take a little time to test out tolerance to advertising and so forth.

--Linda Holmes

10:38 AM ET | 09-25-2008 | permalink

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