Homicide: Life on the Street is streaming on Peacock, bringing joy to fans of its original ’90s run, fans of Andre Braugher, and those who will become fans after their first viewing.
This popular and critically beloved show has been available on DVD for years but was MIA on any streaming service until now.
Homicide: Life on the Street joins two other classic shows, Moonlighting and Northern Exposure, that were lost to streaming until recently.
Like Homicide: Life on the Street, these two shows had at least been available for purchase on DVD, whereas many other shows from that era weren’t so lucky.
Since streaming is how most people access visual media these days, just how many other forgotten gems of TV history are we missing out on?
A Priority Shift
Streaming services first established themselves by offering as many popular TV shows as they could get, like when Netflix featured every season of Friends and The Office — ad-free!
Viewers at the time assumed that all of these familiar shows would always be available on the new streaming platforms, but most were only there under limited license agreements.
The streaming services then began producing their own content, so they apparently needed to make room for that on their digital warehouse shelves.
Subscriptions were the metric for streaming services like “advertising eyeballs” for network television. These services pivoted to original offerings to attract subscribers instead of maintaining or bulking up their classic TV libraries.
This was a time when the majority of TV viewers had cable packages and not just streaming channels, so they could theoretically scratch their classic TV itch with shows that aired on basic cable’s Nick at Nite or TBS.
Besides, weren’t most of those old shows available on DVD, anyway?
Forgotten Formats
If one looks hard enough, a fair number of 20th-century shows are available on DVD, but often not in their entirety.
Like the 1989 Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis sitcom Anything But Love, where just the first two of its four seasons were released on DVD, sold together as a “Volume 1” box set that sadly never got a “Volume 2.”
There’s also The Drew Carey Show, an incredibly popular ’90s series that ran for nine seasons, but only its first is available on DVD (however, the entire series can now be streamed on Pluto and Apple TV+).
While DVD players haven’t quite gone the way of the VHS tape, they’re an added barrier and expense in a world where the cost of streaming channels is daunting enough.
This makes the availability of classic shows in streaming format critical if they are to find a contemporary audience.
How Many Shows Are We Talking About Here?
The number of 20th- and early 21st-century TV shows that are currently unavailable to stream (or purchase on DVD) is astonishing — and random.
Shows you may have watched on their first airing, in syndicated reruns, or clicked through on cable over the years while channel surfing are surprisingly absent from any sort of assumed permanent archive.
In the late ’70s to early ’80s, ABC’s Saturday night “Must See TV” lineup was The Love Boat, followed by Fantasy Island.
You can still catch a ride on the original Pacific Princess via Paramount+ but forget about flying to Ricardo Montalban’s magic island. While the series was on Tubi for a while, it’s nowhere to be found again.
So, if you were in the middle of watching it, and it got pulled unceremoniously, you can’t find it anywhere else.
(However, you can visit the deliciously dark 1998 Malcolm McDowell and the fantastically fun 2021 Roselyn Sanchez versions of Fantasy Island on Tubi.)
The seminal ’80s crime shows Vega$ and Spenser for Hire shared the same vibes, popularity, and even star in Robert Urich, but Vega$ is lost to the neon mists of time while Spenser can currently be hired over at Apple TV+ and Tubi.
Landmark medical dramas of the ’70s and ’80s aren’t immune from going missing, either.
M*A*S*H is available to stream or purchase on several subscription platforms, but Quincy, M.E. (with Jack Klugman as an idealistic coroner) and Trapper John, M.D. (with Gregory Harrison in his prime) are not.
Why Aren’t These Shows Available to Stream?
Music rights, studio ownership squabbles, and contract issues are the main reasons keeping shows in limbo. Money and lack of interest are the others.
Decades ago, songs were licensed for a show’s original live network airings and syndication.
Physical formats like DVDs weren’t included because they didn’t yet exist, and contracts didn’t have all-media rights clauses covering any formats invented in the future, like streaming.
The more songs featured in a series, the more difficult and expensive it is to detangle the song rights for streaming. Then, the question becomes whether potential audience interest in a show is high enough to merit the cost of securing those rights.
Another issue is that studios, networks, and production companies have been bought, sold, or blended so often in recent years that it’s hard to determine who currently has the rights to various shows.
The availability of Homicide: Life On The Street, Moonlighting, and Northern Exposure might be taken as a sign that these legal obstacles are not impossible to overcome.
But it still leaves the question of why more of these classic shows aren’t being salvaged and streamed.
Vanished Versus Difficult To Find
Some classic shows are more “lost” than others. Even worse than just having one season released decades ago, they never made it to DVD at all.
This is the mystifying case with two quirky Y2K-era shows centered around singles: Ed (2000) and Cupid (1998).
Ed dropped Northern Exposure’s city-professional-versus-loony-locals playbook into a candy-colored suburb, a combo that snagged super-high ratings and four seasons for the NBC show.
The show starred Tom Cavanagh and featured future notables Julie Bowen, Justin Long, and John Slattery, among others. But despite a substantial fanbase both then and now, Ed remains unavailable on DVD and streaming.
Cupid bounced between different time slots during its sole season, which didn’t help secure an audience for the admittedly esoteric show about a man who is either The God of Love come to Earth or a deeply delusional mortal.
This early series created by Rob Thomas showcased the innovative storytelling and witty dialogue displayed in his later projects, such as Veronica Mars and Party Down.
Cupid starred Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall and boasted an impressive roster of guest stars, including Sherilyn Fenn, Connie Britton, and Laura Leighton. It also had a fantastic theme song (“Human”) performed by The Pretenders.
Sadly, none of this earned Cupid either a second season or a DVD release, only an odd, single-season 2009 ABC remake starring Bobby Cannavale.
The strong creative pedigrees of these shows, plus diehard original fan interest, make them seem like great choices for a streaming service to pick up.
But for whatever reason, they remain lost to memory.
What’s The Holdup Here
Thirtysomething (1987) is a landmark show that is still in streaming limbo despite a vocal lobby of fans.
The series followed a group of yuppie-adjacent friends in suburban Philadephia as they dealt with having children, mortgages, and compromising their college ideals for money.
Mocked at the time for its navel-gazing monologues and mundane, champagne-problem plotlines, the show resonated with a demographic that hadn’t seen its struggles and sensibilities depicted on TV before.
The show became known for structurally innovative episodes and went on to win thirteen Emmy awards.
It also featured an episode (“Strangers”) that marked the first time on American network television that two gay male characters were shown in bed together.
According to tweets from Mel Harris, who played Hope Steadman, there are no ownership rights issues that keep the show from streaming; there is just a lack of interest from Amazon Studios.
Why This Matters
The list of lost shows could go on for days: Judging Amy, China Beach (Not having access to these two is downright sinful), Chicago Hope, Murphy Brown, Relativity, and Once and Again, for starters.
The preservation of our television history aside, we’re simply missing out on decades of entertainment by not making more of these shows available for streaming.
Our IP-centric cultural moment seems ideal for mining this potential treasure trove of vintage shows to pad streaming platform libraries and perhaps strike another surpriseSuits nerve, as Suits did for Netflix.
It would also be nice to access the more complete bodies of work of our favorite performers and show creators.
What lost classic shows would you like to stream? Let us know in the comments!