Peter M Fitzgerald
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 1999
- Messages
- 2,314
- Real Name
- Peter Fitzgerald
You'd think so, yes, but... look back at what Universal did (or, more to the point, didn't do) with their initially-promising cable networks Chiller and Sleuth (later renamed "Cloo"), starting with their debuts in the mid-2000s. Sleuth/Cloo, in particular. Rather than use it as a platform to weave-in some prime, Universal-owned material from the 1950s-1970s that wouldn't otherwise be seen, in among the heavily-played old reliables they owned and/or licensed from other studios, they instead opted just to dump the usual reruns of Magnum PI, Miami Vice, The A-Team, The Equalizer and Knight Rider, along with more recent crime series like Law & Order, Homicide: Life in the Street and Monk. It would've been the perfect opportunity to dust-off and transfer to digital the bulk of 1950s Dragnet, M-Squad, Hec Ramsey, T.H.E. Cat, etc, for late-night and weekend play, along side the more famous/popular material, along the lines of how they programmed Sci-Fi Channel in its earliest days. Instead, they barely even played the color Dragnet episodes, and I don't think they even ran Columbo on the channel, nor MacMillan & Wife, Switch, It Takes a Thief, McCloud, and the list goes on and on.
I recall their website (back when it was "Sleuth") had a comments section, with fans listing no-brainer Universal-owned crime/mystery series (like those I've listed above) they wanted to see on the channel (not just 1950s rarities requiring restoration), but they were talking to a brick wall --and this was a year or two before the Universal vault fire and the big economic slowdown of 2007-08. Chiller was a little better in its earliest days (at least they ran The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Darkroom), but they never aired (Boris Karloff's) Thriller at any point in their existence (and this was a Universal-owned horror-themed channel!), even though they had the series on tape from the Sci-Fi Channel days, and it (thankfully) got its subsequent DVD release. Cloo shut down completely, as a network, a couple of months ago (long after "channel drift" had taken it away from its original crime/mystery theme), and Chiller has recently been dropped from both Dish Network and Charter, and thus will most likely share Cloo's fate, sooner rather than later.
There's a lesson in there, somewhere.
