Jeremiah season 2 (finally!)

[cellio]

Several years ago I learned about the TV show Jeremiah, which was written (and produced, at least in part) by JMS (of B5 fame). The story is a post-apocalypse drama that moves from surviving to rebuilding, with the challenges you would expect along the way, and the slowly-revealed backstory of how that apocalypse came to be in the first place. (Ok, more slowly revealed in the script than in my brain, but that's ok.) I didn't get the relevant channel back when the show aired, but the first season eventually came out on DVD so I got to see that. The second season, however, continued to elude me.

When I got a Netflix membership a few months ago I noticed that while there were no DVDs, the second season was available for streaming. I figured that one way or another I was going to have a Roku box by now to watch streaming video on the TV (watching TV on the computer kind of sucks), so I waited. The Roku box (do they have a generic term for "Roku box" to protect their trademark?) was ready to go on Sunday, so I moved a few things around in my streaming queue before settling down to break it in. That's when I noticed what I'm pretty sure was an annotation that could only be a few days old: Jeremiah would be available for streaming only until the end of December 2009.

Well. Deep breath. Two days (yesterday and tomorrow) were already fully booked and parts of Monday and today were, but I figured I could still both watch and enjoy watching the season, and I couldn't figure out any useful way to capture that stream for later viewing with tools already on hand, so off I went.

I just finished watching it and I am highly satisfied. The second season was cut short (with enough warning that they could react), so -- like the fourth season of B5 -- it was rushed in places that really could have benefited from more time to tell the story, but it worked well anyway and I'm not sure that extra time would have been spent in the best places anyway. This was compressed but it worked; that's no small feat.

Apparently there was talk of a third season (yes, despite the handling of the second), but I'm glad it didn't happen. I enjoyed this show, but it ended in a very good place, leaving us to imagine how the rest plays out without showing it to us. Showing it to us would have weakened the story, in my opinion. Unless the next season was going to jump forward a few years, I'm having trouble imagining how it wouldn't have been a let-down.

Tonight, Wikipedia informs me that a DVD release of the second season is finally planned (US only) -- probably the reason the streaming is going away. That's good news; I wonder what brought it on. (It's going to be "manufacture on demand" and I'm not sure what that means about quality or packaging; we'll have to wait and see.)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

do they have a generic term for "Roku box" to protect their trademark?

I think they originally called it the "Roku Netflix Player", but that was unwieldly, and it now does more than just Netflix. Since Roku is the name of the company that makes the box, their trademark is probably easily enforced.

[cellio]

I figured they (like Xerox) might want to mitigate against their name becoming a common noun, and if it's not unwieldy I'm willing to comply, but I couldn't think of one and their web site doesn't have one prominently displayed. Referring to "the Roku" feels a little odd to me, but that's probably because it's new.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I wonder if it is a good or bad thing for a company's name or product name to be accepted as a common noun. It might depend on the marketshare and the ease of making knockoffs.

When I talk about googling something, it reinforces the idea of using a particular search engine. It's hard to corrupt that association because every other search engine tries so hard to set themselves apart. However, most copy machines were easy to make slightly cheaper, so the cheap versions flooded the market. It probably depends on whether Roku has exclusive content deals or not -- I think they do with Netflix but not with Amazon. (at least, I have not heard of other Roku-like boxes other than the Netflix stream-to-computer option)