It’s weird how random things can trigger memories and send you down a path that brings a surprise ending.
Last week I was watching TV and saw a commercial for the new Goosebumps series, which features actor Justin Long. I chuckled, thinking back to the time I first encountered Long on the small screen, as Warren P. Cheswick on the NBC show Ed, the “dramedy” about the bowling alley lawyer. Well, the lawyer who owned a bowling alley. They were two separate things. Some of ya’ll know that was one of my favorite shows ever, and I’ve long mourned that due to various licensing issues it had disappeared, never turning up on either DVD (when that was a thing) or a streaming service. I used to follow the drive to get the show released again, but gave up hope long ago.
After seeing that commercial I started reading up on the actors from Ed and digging around to see if it had ever popped up on one of those random channels buried deep in the cable lineup.
Suddenly I was struck by a thought and went to YouTube, where I typed in a search for Ed. Sure enough, some of the episodes seemed to be available! I had never thought of looking for it on YouTube, which kind of makes me an idiot. In my defense, the shows I found have only been available for three years, which was long after I had concluded the show was lost forever.
I was very happy. Hell, as I said in last Friday’s playlist, my heart was full. Twenty-ish years of searching had come to an end and I would finally be able to watch Ed again!
Over the past week I knocked out all 22 episodes of season one, which aired during the 2000-01 TV season. Was the wait worth it, or was finally seeing the show again a letdown?
As you would expect, while there were plenty of small moments that came back to me immediately, for the most part it was like watching a brand-new show. It’s been 23 years, for crying out loud!
It still holds up pretty well, although perhaps not as good as upon my original viewing. I think a lot of that is simply because when it first aired, I was in the exact same phase of life as the main characters, and it was maybe easier to buy into every aspect of the storylines. Looking back as a middle aged man, the life and times of 30-somethings doesn’t resonate the same way. It also seems like Ed’s take on comedy was unique at that time, where there is a whole swath of shows that landed in the same general neighborhood of humor that have aired in the years since.1
I believe a criticism at the time Ed aired was that it was sometimes too cute for its own good and too self-satisfied in its cuteness. I was aware of that back in the day, and it was obvious upon the re-watch. It didn’t bother me at all, but I understand the knock.
I think this is a good point to mention the David Letterman influence on Ed. Show creators Jon Beckerman and Rob Burnett both came from The Late Show. David himself received an executive producer credit and, according to an article I found last week, he would pop up on set occasionally and make some script suggestions. There are numerous wacky little moments that I was sure were Dave’s work. Even when he didn’t directly touch a script, you feel his comedic POV baked deep into them.
Obviously it was kind of wild to see the clothes the actors wore. Everything was sooooo 2000. The men’s clothes, especially the suits, were a little baggy. I’m pretty sure my casual wardrobe at the time was quite similar to Ed Stevens’. And the women? Seeing what the ladies of Ed wore took me back to every happy hour and party of that era.
One of the big reasons the show disappeared after TBS ran re-runs for a few years was because it used so much music by real musicians. Foo Fighters, Marshall Crenshaw, the Dandy Warhols, and Toto, to name a few. As the landscape shifted and shows began getting released on DVDs and eventually showing up on streaming services, the rights for all those songs had not been secured for anything but airing the show on traditional TV. Between the number of songs used and the lack of wide popularity of the show, there was no great push to do all the paperwork required to clear all that music.
That is notable because of how one of the YouTube channels I found Ed on presented the show. When a song was featured as more than background music, they somehow filtered out all the audio except for the dialogue. It suddenly felt like I was swimming as the bulk of the audio came through super muffled, then when an actor spoke it was like they were far, far away and their voices barely could barely make it to me. It was an odd sensation.
I think that’s purely because of YouTube rules. About 10 years ago Rob Burnett spoke about the show’s status and said that music licensing rules had changed and that was no longer the holdup to releasing DVDs. Instead it was because two different studios shared the production rights to Ed, and it was again unlikely they would put in the time and money to give the show a second life. Who knows, maybe that will change and properly mastered versions will appear on a streamer someday.
Which would be cool, because the YouTube versions stink. They are all transfers from VHS tapes, so they look and sound terrible. Sometimes there were errors because of issues with the quality of the tape that made me laugh. Kids today don’t know how volatile VHS tapes were! Here are a couple screenshots to both show the overall quality of the videos and one of the errors that popped up.
The main channel I watched did not have episodes 20 or 21 uploaded, so I had to look for another option. The poster who submitted those episodes did not cancel out the songs, which gave me a little auditory whiplash.
Both channels I found taped the shows off of the San Diego NBC station, which is a little random. On a few episodes they left in promos for other NBC shows, or Ed-specific promos. I tried to go to the website listed for a contest to bowl with the cast of Ed – http://nbci.com/bowlwithed – but sadly the website doesn’t appear to be functional any longer. Surely I signed up for that back in 2001.
I was wondering if this was one of the first hyper-caffeinated shows on TV that featured spitfire-rapid dialogue. That became the norm in the 2000s, but still seemed new at the time. Ed and his pals were always drinking coffee, hanging in a coffee shop, etc. while having these crazy-fast conversations. The characters on Friends hung out in a coffee shop, too, but that crew seemed a lot more chill than the Ed cast. Perhaps a clue came late in the season when Carol Vessey brings Ed a coffee and ensures him there are five sugars in it. Holy shit!
Now we get to the nut of the show: The Ed & Carol “Will they or won’t they” story. Julie Bowen is a national treasure and most folks know her way better from her years as Claire Dunphy on Modern Family than anything else she’s appeared in. She’s probably right below Julia Louis-Dreyfus if you talk about comedic actresses who have had the best and longest careers. But Julia is one of the greatest comedic actors, male or female, in the history of TV, so being #2 isn’t a bad spot.
That said, I forgot how devastatingly hot 30-year-old Julie Bowen was. I mean, Good Lord! I laughed at myself because my impression from 23 years ago very much held up. She was hot enough to challenge the paradigms I lived my life by. When the also very attractive Rena Sofer arrived as district attorney Bonnie Hane, who Ed dated briefly, both now and in 2000 I would have picked Vessey over her, and I’ve almost always been a brunetttes-over-blondes guy.
I feel obligated to point out that Bowen is a fantastic actress as well. She’s enthralling to watch not just because she is beautiful but also because she does such a fine job of using her physicality and her facial gestures to enhance the words her character speaks. I should also point out that I was on Team Bowen way back when she appeared as Roxanne Please on ER. Someone, somewhere still has my emails to prove it.
As much a I loved Ed back in the day, I did not start watching it until a few episodes into season one. I don’t think I ever saw the pilot, even in reruns. The YouTube channel had a copy of the original, un-aired pilot, which featured several actors that were re-cast between when it was shot and NBC picked the show up. It was very weird to see Donal Logue playing Phil Stubbs instead of Michael Ian Black. Those scenes were all reshot with Black and the other replacement actors for the episode that NBC actually aired.
Speaking of Black, there were several other guests who cycled into the show who would go on to become famous appearing on the same VH1 shows that he did. It was extra funny that there is a late-season storyline about Stubbs trying to get onto a VH1 prank show.
The primary actors were all quite good. I think it was the secondary actors that made the show really shine, though. And you certainly felt the Letterman influence in them. They were all a bunch of oddballs, although certainly entertaining and harmless oddballs. Long was listed as a member of the main cast, but I feel like he was a connecting point between them and the oddballs. His bumbling, stumbling, overwhelmed by nerves high school junior was brilliant.
So my quest to find Ed is finally over. I would call it a satisfying resolution. There were certainly some flaws to the show, but overall, it held up pretty well and I was very glad to find it. Given the dates on these uploads, they may have popped up during the Covid lockdown. That would have been a good time to re-watch them.
There were 83 total episodes. I don’t know if all of those are on YouTube, but I’m going to dive into season two soon, just in case someone decides to pull them all down and bury the show once again.
1. Scrubs, Parks and Recreation, Community, The Good Place all, in some way, have stylistic/thematic connections to Ed.
