About this Blog

Scraping the waxy yellow buildup off the reputation of TV's most unjustly neglected classic. . .

This blog would never have been possible without the good work of the folks at Shout! Factory, who continue to rescue one classic television series after another from oblivion. Their latest rescue, of course, was the November 2013 release of a DVD set of the complete MH2, which has finally given me the chance to see this series I've sought for so long.

You see, I was but a kid when MH2 debuted, and never even knew of it existence until years after the series ended. I came to the series backwards in a manner of speaking, in that I was first a huge fan of the sitcom Soap, which debuted about a year and half after MH2. I was such a huge Soap fan, in fact, that when I encountered books or articles making the obvious comparisons between the two shows, I was immediately intrigued by this mysterious MH2. Everything I read told me that MH2 made Soap look like kid's stuff, which is hard to imagine if you know what subjects Soap tackled. But MH2 was by all accounts the true soap opera spoof, the one that knew how to play it just straight enough to hit the jugular vein of this cliche-ridden genre (which, to be fair, Soap never really set out to do). MH2 was (according to what I'd read) uncompromising, unique, funny, harrowing, controversial, ground breaking and wildly popular.

And yet, it never really came back into reruns (at least, not for very long). I could never understand it. The cast had a number of soon-to-be or already famous stars, and the show was a huge success in its time, an icon of 1970s television despite the obstacle of being one of the earliest shows to air in first-run syndication (no network would touch it, not even with super-producer Norman Lear's backing). Soap flourished in reruns-- why hadn't MH2? Flash forward to 2007, when Sony decided to tease us all with a miserably limited DVD set containing only the first 25 episodes, representing less than 10% of the series. At least this gave me a chance to see a chunk of episodes for the first time. I was completely won over before I'd finished watching the first show. I mainlined all 25 episodes in a weekend, then spent the next 6 years whining occasionally to friends that I'd never get the chance to see the whole series, because clearly a company with Sony's track record of abandoning their DVD properties would never release more volumes.

Then came the shocking miracle of 2013: Shout! Factory announced a complete DVD set of all 325 episodes, plus (as usual for them) a healthy roundup of bonus features. Despite my financial circumstances being such that buying a latte is currently a matter of serious consideration, I leaped at the chance to spend a couple hundred bucks I can't spare to order the set directly from the Shout! Factory site, which entitled me to receive it a month early. I've spent that month working my way through the set, with ever increasing admiration for the series, as well as ever increasing confusion over how anything so clearly so great could have remained so impossible to see for so long.

Which brings me to this, my first leap into the blogosphere, hoping to share my enthusiasm for a staggering work of pop culture art with other folks who, like me, have waited a couple of generations to see this series. The format of episode posts will probably morph a bit before I settle into what works best, but my plan is this: Every weekday, a new episode will be written up, with a short, spoiler-free summary, and a longer section to provide a review/commentary (either solo or in dialogue with the other contributors I hope will be joining in.) The posts will undoubtedly start off a lot longer than they will become, because at first there's so much new ground to cover. Later, I'm sure there will be more to say about some episodes than others, but they're all worth a closer look.

Please jump in and join the discussion in the comments section-- I'm really looking forward to reading other folks' thoughts! In addition, this blog will attempt to fill in a lot of additional information about the series along the way, with pages dedicated to the cast and crew members, collections of articles and reviews, and possibly occasional original essays or news items. Having been out of the limelight for so many years, MH2 doesn't have much a presence on the internet: No episode guides, no fan-created web sites, even the imdb pages for the show are woefully incomplete. It's my hope that this blog will become a go-to site for information and discussion of this incredible series, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.