Displaying items by tag: Crackle

For the past few years, perhaps the best place to stream obscure, little-known classic television shows was on the AVOD Crackle.

While the user-experience is not great and the ad-load seems to be one of the highest in the industry, it was worth the annoyance in order to stream TV shows you couldn't find anywhere else.

Crackle began as a video service called Grouper in 2006 and it was acquired by Sony Pictures two years later. The name was changed to Crackle and then Sony Crackle. But it never quite found an audience. In part because despite being owned by a major studio, Sony preferred to license its hottest titles to other streamers.

Sony sold off a majority interest to the entertainment company Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment in 2019.

While Sony no longer owned Crackle, the streamer was able to license a large number of titles from the company. Many times there were episodes missing due to things such as licensing issues, a problem described by Crackle's Head of Programming Jeff Meier, when I spoke with him in the fall of 2021:

I would assume the licensing issue is also why sometimes there will be shows where Crackle just has four episodes out of a 17-episode season or something similar?

Most of those situations have to do with music clearance and materials. So for example, there was one show the other day that we were looking at getting a couple more episodes, but they had never been transferred off of film. And the process of transferring off of film is going to cost so many thousands of dollars, that it was just not going to be financially feasible to do it for that show.

But most of it tends to be music clearance and a lot of the situations that you've seen so far because frankly, you've caught on and reported on some of this before I've really even started messaging it out or marketing it yet. Some of the time we just don't have everything in yet. Like It's Your Move, for example. I know there's only four episodes up right now. We're supposed to get to the place where we eventually have ten. I think it had 16 or 17 overall, but the other seven are not cleared. But we just haven't processed the other six yet. So then it becomes a question of, do you hold it till you get all of them? Or do you at least get people in the door with the ones you've got so far? And we've been trying to get it on the air.

My viewpoint is with a lot of these old shows, even if you can get like a six-pack of them on right now, for a fan who has a memory of that show that's at least enough to retrigger it. Even if we can't deliver them the actual complete series. It's frustrating with music clearance. Maybe someday it'll work its way through and there'll be a template which allows a lot of the older TV content to be seen. But right now,  it's literally a song by song renewal process. 

And that's also how things end up getting replaced. But replacing the music is expensive, too. Or at least, relatively more expensive than doing nothing. And I don't think very many people like having replaced music. So it becomes  a real conundrum. I hope that it works its way out at some point.

While Crackle had access to a lot of Sony television classic TV, in recent years the availability has been a bit unpredictable. The licensing deals seemed to run about three months and while they were eventually renewed for most the shows, it hasn't been uncommon for a large block of TV shows to be missing from Crackle for a few days after the end of the deal.

On August 1st, I noticed Crackle's TV library took a massive hit. Dozens of shows were missing and there hadn't been any warning ahead of their removal. Knowing the way things had worked previously with the streamer, I wanted to wait a few days before I wrote anything. But as of today (8/14), the shows haven't returned and the titles include essentially every unique broadcast classic TV show that was part of Crackles library.

It's unclear what happened and if all or any of the titles are returning. Although if I was to hazard a guess, the catalog purge might be related to news that Chicken Soup For The Soul is considering a sale or partnership as it struggles to recover from its ill-timed decision to acquire DVD rental service Redbox.

But for now, Crackle's catalog includes a few classic TV titles. But nothing that can't be seen elsewhere.

As best as I can tell, here is the list of TV titles that left Crackle's library on August 1st. I have seen a few titles (such as Grady) pop up on other AVODs. But most of the titles are now missing from streaming. At least until I can convince someone to launch that Classic TV AVOD.

Action
Adventures Of The Seaspray
Archie Bunker's Place
Awesome Adventures
Bad Teacher
Barney Miller
Beautiful People
Benson
Between Brothers
Big Day
Blue Thunder
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Breaking In
Bridget Loves Bernie
Brothers
Camp Runamuck
Canterbury's law
Cassie & Company
Charlie's Angels
Chopper One
Code Red
Crazy Like A Fox
David Cassidy: Man Undercover
Dilbert
Doctor, Doctor
Dr. Ken
Extreme Ghostbusters
Fish
Fortune Dane
Game Of Silence
Ghost Story/Circle Of Fear
Gloria
Grady
Guys Like Us
Hawk
Hazel
Heavy Gear
High Tide
Houston Knights
Hudson Street
Huff
Iron Horse
It's Your Move
Jeannie
Kidnapped
Ladies Man
Last Resort
Living Dolls
Marry Me
Melba
Men In Black: The Series
Mercy Point
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer
Mr. Merlin
Mr. Sunshine
Muddling Through
My Big Fat Greek Life
My Boys
My Two Dads
Ned And Stacey
NewsRadio
Occasional Wife
Odyssey 5
One In A Million
One Of The Boys
Pan Am
Parker Lewis Can't Lose
Police Story
Police Woman
Quark
Rake
Raven
Roughnecks: Starship Trooper Chronicles
Salvage 1
Sheena
Shipmates
Sledgehammer
Soap
Something Is Out There
Square Pegs
Starman
Tabitha
10 Items Or Less
The Apollo Chronicles
The Beast
The Blacklist: Redemption
The Critic
The Dana Carvey Show
The Ellen Show
The Famous Teddy Z
The Fantastic Voyage
The Flying Nun
The Girl With Something Extra
The Gregory Hines Show
The Grown Ups
The Jackie Chan Adventures
The Jeff Foxworthy Show
The Karate Kid
The Michael J. Fox Show
The Naked Truth
The Net
The Outcasts
The Partridge Family
The Partridge Family 2200 A.D.
The Player
The Powers That Be
The Real Ghostbusters
The Rookies
The Unusuals
That's My Mama
T.J. Hooker
Top Of The Heap
Tour Of Duty
Us & Them
Welcome To The Family

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For fans of classic and nearly forgotten television, the ad-supported streaming service Crackle has been the go-to destination in recent years. Its catalog has included dozens of television shows that aren't available anywhere else, and many of them hadn't been seen anywhere since they originally aired.

The downside is that Crackle works under some fairly challenging licensing constraints. For whatever reason, some of studios it works with (most notably Sony TV), prefer to license their programing to Crackle with terms as short as three months. Which has meant shows are frequently churning on-and-off through the service, sometimes disappearing for a few days before returning for another three months.

But even with those caveats, October 1st brought a classic TV Armageddon for viewers, when nearly 100 titles left the service.

It's not clear whether any of the expired titles will return to Crackle. Although it's notable to mention that a few titles originally set to leave the service on October 1st have apparently been renewed:

Dr. Ken
Extreme Ghostbusters
Just Shoot Me

Here is the rundown of all the titles that left Crackle on October 1st:

Adventures Of The Seaspray
Bad Teacher
Barney Miller
Beautiful People
Benson
Between Brothers
Blue Thunder
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Bridget Loves Bernie
Briothers
Camp Runamuck
Canterbury's Law
Cashmere Mafia
Cassie & Company
Charlie's Angels
Chopper One
Code Red
Crazy Like A Fox
David Cassidy: Man Undercover
Dilbert
Doctor, Doctor
Fantastic Journey
Fish 
Fortune Dane
Game Of Silence
Ghost Story/Circle Of Fear
Gloria
Grady
Hawk
Hazel
Heavy Gear
High Tide 
Houston Nights
Hudson Street
Iron Horse
It's Your Move
Jeannie
Kidnapped
Ladies Man
Last Resort
Living Dolls
Melba
Men In Black: The Series
Mercy Point
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer
Mr. Merlin
Mr. Sunshine
Muddling Through
My Big Fat Greek Life
My Boys
My Two Dads
Ned And Stacey
Newsradio
Occasional Wife
Odyssey 5
One In A Million
One Of The Boys
Pan Am
Parker Lewis Can't Lose
Partridge Family: 2200 A.D.
Police Story
Quark
Raven
Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles
Salvage 1
Sheena
Shipmates
Sledge Hammer!
Soap
Something Is Out There
Square Pegs 
Starman
Starsky & Hutch
S.W.A.T.
Tabitha
That's My Mama
10 Items Or Less
The Beast
The Blacklist: Redemption
The Critic
The Dana Carvey Show
The Ellen Show
The Famous Teddy Z
The Girl With Something Extra
The Gregory Hines Show
The Grown Ups
The Jeff Foxworthy Show
The Karate Kid
The Naked Truth
The Net
The Outcasts
The Partridge Family
The Player
The Powers That Be
The Real Ghostbusters
The Rookies
The Unusuals
T.J. Hooker
Top Of The Heap
V.I.P.
What About Joan?


MOVIES


FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30TH, 2022:
Adventures In Zambezia
Alien Hunter
All That Jazz
All The Young Men
American Outlaws
And Justice For All
Angel Of Death
Annie: A Royal Adventure
Anzio
Apache Territory
Arizona Raiders
Bad Country
Bat 21 
Battle Stations
Bermuda Triangle
Bite The Bullet
Black Gunn
Blue Thunder
Brian's Song (2001)
Butterflies Are Free
California Split
Cisco Pike
Cold Comes The Night
Comanche Station
Cover Girl
Cowboy
Cowboy Be-Bop
Crazy In Alabama
Das Boot (Directors Cut)
Defendor
Diamond Head
$ (Dollars)
Drunken Master
Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers
40 Days To Apache Pass
1941
7th Calvary
The Ambushers
The Anderson Tapes
The Blob
The Boy In The Plastic Bubble
The Breed
The Cheap Detective
The Deep End Of The Ocean
The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad
The Valachi Papers
The Wackiest Ship In The Army
20 Million Miles To Earth
Under The Yum Yum Tree
Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning
U-Turn
Vibes
Walk, Don't Run
Walking Tall: Lone Justice
Where Angels Go...Trouble Follows

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8TH, 2022:
The Bodyguard

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14TH, 2022:
Desert Saints

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15TH, 2022:
Don't Go In The Woods

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6TH, 2022:
Discontinued
Doug Stanhope: Comedians' Comedian's Comedians
Doug Stanhope: Nom Place Like Home
Eddie Griffin: You Can Tell 'Em I Said It!
Eugene Mirman: On His Way To The Complain Store

Crackle is one of those advertiser-supported streamers that has never quite managed to find its niche. It launched as a video service called Grouper in 2006 and it was acquired by Sony Pictures two years later. The name was changed to Crackle and then Sony Crackle. But despite having access to some of Sony's catalog as well as spending money on an aggressive attempt at original content (it was the original home of Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee), the service never seemed to gather traction. Even though it reportedly has more than 40 million monthly users.

Sony sold off a majority interest to the entertainment company Chicken Soup For The Soul in 2019 and in February of this year, Sony veteran Jeff Meier was named head of programming for Crackle Plus, the Chicken Soup For The Soul portfolio of streaming networks including Crackle, Popcornflix and Truli. And since Meier has taken over, the content mix on Crackle has noticeably evolved. Particularly in the case of the genre of classic and/or obscure television. Which makes sense given the fact that when he was at Sony, Meier was general manager and SVP of programming for Sony's classic TV diginet getTV.

I recently spoke with Meier about Crackle's overall programming philosophy, but also we took a deep dive into the challenges of clearing older television shows for streaming. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity:

First of all, before we get to the Classic TV part of this discussion,  I want to talk about Crackle in general. When it comes to the programming philosophy, who do you see as the audience? And have you gotten to the point yet where you can look at a title and decide, "okay, this is something I think is a good fit for our audience. This is something that they're gonna engage with."

I see our audience as being anybody that wants free TV and wants free content. And that tends to fall under certain parameters. Ironically, I think that people looking for free TV are often people who watch a lot of TV. I think that it's a wide range of demographics. I think it's old and young. You know, there's cord nevers, but there's also a lot of cord cutters. It's multicultural, and racially diverse. It's men and women. We've chosen not really get into the kids world. There's just lots of regulations and nuances about that, it's a very specialized space. But everything else I'm kind of open to. What I'm looking to is to try and figure out where we can be different than others.

And moving down the path of classic TV as part of that, I think that not everybody else is focusing on that space. So I like to be able to zig where other people zag. But for a long time we've believed that we should have originals. I believe that Crackle was one of the first AVODs (advertising-supported video on demand) to have originals. And they've been doing it for 10 years, whether it was done by Sony or now is being done by Chicken Soup for the Soul. So we've always known the importance of originals. It's evolved over time, what kinds of ones work well. Recently, we've been having a lot of success with sports related originals, and sort of docuseries figures. We have a whole basketball themed tray coming in October, that is based around a Vince Carter documentary called Vince Carter: Legacy. And in the middle of the month, we've got a documentary called Green Wave, which is another inspirational basketball high school basketball documentary. So we've seen that approach works. We've seen that that content appealing to black audiences work. We noticed this first years ago, we used to get tons of numbers for Sanford And Son and 227 and classic oldies like that. And we've now seen that parlay into interest for fresher content as well.

I guess the other part of your question is do we look at stuff and say, we can see this would work with our audience? To me, it's straightforward looking at the numbers.  We see what has worked before, and we try and find all that stuff that's like it. We've always had a strong performance from action movies. So I continually look for new action movies. And we look at what we know about the shows that work well, and how they've generally appealed out to the market. And we can think through what other stuff appeals to that same audience.

Which gets me to Crackle's classic TV library.  When I talk to other streaming executives, the perception in the industry is that classic TV - particularly stuff which isn't well known - the perception is that there's not an audience for it. That not enough people engage with those programs so it's really not worth dealing with. Obviously, you have a different philosophy and I suspect part of that's because this is the type of stuff you're interested in. But can you just talk about, from a business standpoint, what makes those older TV programs a viable thing for Crackle?

Well, I look at classic TV this way. Most of this television aired back on the major networks when there are only three networks and programs were getting cancelled when they had a 20 share. And so those are big numbers of people. These are shows that were getting on the cover of TV Guide, and lots of people were watching, Compared to what constitutes a hit today, I'm pretty sure more people probably watched Tabitha at the time, then watched a typical episode of Girls. But that really doesn't get reported. Because everything's about the numbers and the relative success today versus other things today. I do think there's a lot of collective memory bank for most of these shows.

Second, I think heavy TV watchers want to watch things that feel like the kind of stuff they used to love, But they don't remember it because it hasn't been repeated 20,000 times. It is sort of watching something fresh, but in an old medium. And I think that's sort of a fun way to analyze it.

The third thing that I try and do with the classic TV to connect the audience with a lot of these shows by having a connection to something broader. So when we have a show like Muddling Through, that was the show that Jennifer Aniston was in before Friends. And if Muddling Through had gotten renewed, she wouldn't have been able to do Friends. So I try and find a tie to stars, events, producers that are still relevant today in some way. It's not just for the people that are remembering the show for the first time. There's some curiosity triggered for somebody to go back and say, "Hey, what did Halle Berry look like back then?" We just launched Living Dolls and it's Halle Berry and Leah Remini in a sitcom. And it's interesting to then see them in that context, if you didn't see it in the first place. So those are some of the things that I think connect people to it. Otherwise, what I like about those shows is that it helps us stand out in some way. Everybody else is competing with the same kinds of things. And this helps us differentiate a little and then create a little bit of buzz.

I wanted to talk a bit more specifically about programming. And one question I had was the philosophy of cycling shows on and off on a fairly short basis. Is that a decision driven by licensing or is it more of a programming decision?

It's not so much a philosophy as it's figuring out how to make the right deals with our partners. And a lot of them want to cycle shows off. And part of the way that we get these shows is that it's serving as an experiment ground for them as well. There's always a changing marketplace, they may be looking for other opportunities. Maybe they're bringing content to us and then they want to see how it does. In many ways, I feel like Crackle is almost like a little bit of a farm system. They see how well it does with us, and then they're like,  "gee, maybe we can go sell this to Netflix for a lot." So if it was up to me, I'd have as much stuff on for as long as I could. There's no reason to take it away. But sometimes just the necessity of the deal requires that we cycle in and out.

I would assume the licensing issue is also why sometimes there will be shows where Crackle just has four episodes out of a 17-episode season or something similar?

Most of those situations have to do with music clearance and materials. So for example, there was one show the other day that we were looking at getting a couple more episodes, but they had never been transferred off of film. And the process of transferring off of film is going to cost so many thousands of dollars, that it was just not going to be financially feasible to do it for that show.

But most of it tends to be music clearance and a lot of the situations that you've seen so far because frankly, you've caught on and reported on some of this before I've really even started messaging it out or marketing it yet. Some of the time we just don't have everything in yet. Like It's Your Move, for example. I know there's only four episodes up right now. We're supposed to get to the place where we eventually have ten. I think it had 16 or 17 overall, but the other seven are not cleared. But we just haven't processed the other six yet. So then it becomes a question of, do you hold it till you get all of them? Or do you at least get people in the door with the ones you've got so far? And we've been trying to get it on the air.

My viewpoint is with a lot of these old shows, even if you can get like a six-pack of them on right now, for a fan who has a memory of that show that's at least enough to retrigger it. Even if we can't deliver them the actual complete series. It's frustrating with music clearance. Maybe someday it'll work its way through and there'll be a template which allows a lot of the older TV content to be seen. But right now,  it's literally a song by song renewal process. 

And that's also how things end up getting replaced. But replacing the music is expensive, too. Or at least, relatively more expensive than doing nothing. And I don't think very many people like having replaced music. So it becomes  a real conundrum. I hope that it works its way out at some point.

It's Your Move is an interesting example, because it's not a show you would think of as having music clearance issues. And it's a really complex issue. I was speaking with someone at Warner Brothers who told me that the reason why a lot of the classic 1960s Warner Brothers TV shows aren't streaming is because back then someone at the studio decided to save money by using library music in the episodes instead of commissioning original music. And now they can't get the library music cleared. So to stream the episodes, you would have to replace the music. And that is just a crazy level of expense. Apparently the only reason why Route 66 is available is because at some point someone paid to get it done for a DVD release.

Exactly, it's weirdly complicated. I mean, it was just two or three years ago that they finally declared that "Happy Birthday" was in the public domain. And prior to that, I was never allowed to use episodes where characters were singing "Happy Birthday," because they had to go clear it. It's small things like that, that you don't think of. There's a there's a movie I ran across, maybe two or three years ago, the only thing keeping it from being seen was that one of the characters did not perform a song. They quoted a Rolling Stone song, something like "as Mick Jagger always said, you know, you can't always get what you want." Well, that is now keeping the movie from being seen. Because they have to come up with a price and go back and clear that. Now they could probably just edit that scene out. But what I've learned with a lot of these companies is that everybody is pressed for time, everybody is slightly understaffed. And little things like that, it puts something on a pile of projects that need to be addressed. As soon as it has that check mark on it, then it becomes a return on investment issue. "Do we really have the time to figure this out, to investigate it, to clear it, to edit it, to do all this stuff? Are we going to make the money back? Are we not going to make the money back? And things get sidelined for decades, sometimes just based on too many uncleared songs.

Given all of that, do you have some shows that you'd like to get cleared or just haven't been able to get worked out yet?

I don't have any dream shows, so to speak. I think every studio has a bunch of these in the library. And I think there's a lot of worthwhile content to be found. And I've tried to adopt the stance of "I will figure out how to find the value in the stuff that is available," rather than worrying about the stuff that isn't. From my own personal childhood. would I like to see the old Donny and Marie reruns or something like that? Yeah, sure. But that's an immense amount of music to clear. So I just roll with it and try and create value out of the ones that I can get.

In the mid-90s, the studios switched from using instrumental music as the musical touchpoints, to using contemporary hits as music drops. And it seems like that really screwed up the getting a lot of those 1990s and later shows on streaming. And it sucks, because there's now this entire generation of TV that is just apparently too expensive or complicated to get cleared.

Just from my Sony experiences, that really accelerated after shows like Dawson's Creek and Party of Five embraced it. And shows from that era are hard to hard to get, because it's just got too much music in it. And I think now the studios have finally learned that it makes sense to just clear everything. Like movies do. We don't have this problem in many feature films, because they clear them in perpetuity across all media when they first make it. It goes back to the same things they were dealing with on I Love Lucy. Which is that nobody thought there was going to be a value in downstream. Desi & Lucy paid for their show to be on film, and then they got to own the negatives because nobody wanted them. That's the worst deal CBS ever made.

The same thing happened with music clearance. They sort of say, "well, gee, we'll just clear it for these two runs. Because we don't know whether the show will be a hit." And since they only cleared for the two runs, when it does end up being 20 episodes or 15 episodes, then it becomes a hurdle to them to try and sell it again. I'm trying to prove out the value of being able to see these shows again. We've been successful with that at both get TV and now at Crackle.

There's this old Western series called The Outcasts, which lasted one season. And I find it to be very historically significant because it looks to me to be maybe the only television show from the Western era that was designed to have both a black and a white costar. I think there were characters in other westerns, but not as the lead from the very beginning of the show. And so I found it to be a very historically significant series even though it lasted only one season. But it's really solid, you know, a lot of these things were weren't canceled because of lack of quality. They were just in tough time periods. And we've put that on and had great success with it. And so even though it's only 26 episodes, it's it's doing very, very well. I think that's the biggest kick you can have as a programming executive. To take something that was unexpected, and have it turn into a success. 

So given that experience, are there some ways in the future where you can curate that experience for customers? A way to let them know, "this is why you should watch this show. It's important for this reason." Because the nature of the streaming experience is that most people go in and randomly click around looking for something that sounds interesting.

I have been contemplating these sorts of issues. When you look at your TV screen, there's not that much room for text. So I think that's part of what has to happen is in the marketing aspect. Either in social media talking to people like you and through our email newsletters that all of our viewers can register and sign up to receive. And when they sign up, we'll send them a weekly newsletter that tells them, what's coming out and what's important to know about it. We have a little blurb that we put on every piece of content called "Why It Crackles." It's not a long explanation, but it's sort of intended to be bit of a short tip, the reason why the show is important. You can't always encapsulate everything that's important about a show in that statement. But but it's a start. It's the goal. I wish I could sit there and explain to everybody why they should watch every show. But we have to figure out the ways to do that outside of just cluttering up the screen with a a five paragraph essay. Although I would be happy to write that.

One of the things that I've written a lot about is that my dream is to take the approach of Turner Classic Movies, but for classic TV people.  TCM does such a great job of curating their stuff, telling viewers this is why it matters.. Granted, you can get away with things in linear TV that you can't on streaming. And the closer we can get to that, the better. Most people don't have a sense of why some obscure show might matter. And they really shouldn't. Most people aren't going to be obsessed with TV at the level that you and I are, but as you said previously, there are a lot of worthwhile things that they should watch if if they only knew why.

We've thought about figuring out ways to express that and I don't think we're there yet. In the old days of Crackle, they even had a show for a while that was a five-minute reap of all the new stuff. We're always assessing and looking at ideas to see if it makes sense. Yeah, I agree, it'll be great to be able to do that with greater context.

My goal, both with classic TV - but also with other categories of programming -  is to build specific communities that that are maybe underserved elsewhere. I think classic movies is interesting,. We've just launched a faith-based tray. And they're not necessarily all connected to each other. I'm not expecting that the faith-based viewers and the classic TV viewers will necessarily overlap. They may be the same, they may be different. But I'm trying to build these sorts of in depth communities. All of whom I think will maybe engage with some of the Crackle originals and with some of the bigger titles. Everybody's got that moment in their life when they want to see a big blockbuster movie and we're hopefully going to have some of those for them when they want to see them. But also, we'll keep populating all those other other sections with new content. And if it's content that people feel passionate about,  they can share that with their friends. And hopefully build some online chatter about it all and that's what gets us in the mix.

Crackle is the streaming service that always feels as if it's three months away from figuring out its place in the streaming entertainment universe. Originally owned by Sony, it began life as a home for random Sony-owned movies and television shows that didn't have enough value to make them worth licensing to another streaming service. "The Best Of What We Have Leftover" is not a great motto for a streaming service and despite a few attempts at original programming, Sony never quite figured out a content mix that made sense. Even though Crackle 1.0 was ad-supported and free, a random mix of titles combined with a truly awkward UX made the service almost invisible to most TV viewers.

But one thing Crackle always had was a small collection of Sony-owned TV shows that you couldn't find anywhere else. Sometimes they were shows that had only lasted a season. Sometimes they were shows that just didn't have any name recognition in the marketplace. Granted, there were problems that annoyed TV fans. Seasons were incomplete or in some random order. A show would only have five episodes available on Crackle for a month. It would then disappear for a couple of months and five other episodes would randomly appear. It wasn't ideal, but in a streaming world where obscure television is generally ignored by all of the major streamers, it was something.

In 2019, Sony Pictures Television sold off a majority stake in Crackle to Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment (CSFTSE) and Crackle was eventually rolled into Crackle Plus, which controlled Crackle as well as a portfolio of other streamers. As part of the deal, CSFTSE retained access to select Sony-owned movies and television shows. So Crackle continued its love of strange and little-known TV.

If you are a fan of obscure television, Crackle has a mini-treasure trove of dramas available this month. The entire 11-episode run of the 1984 series Blue Thunder (based on the motion picture and weirdly co-starring Dana Carvey); season one of the 1994 syndicated action series High Tide (starring Rick Springfield and Yannick Bisson);  the 1966 Burt Reynolds/Gene Hackman series Hawk; the 2009 Adam Goldberg/Amber Tamblyn/Jeremy Renner police detective series The Unusuals; the 2002 Peter Weller series Odyssey 5; the 2008 Lucy Liu series Cashmere Mafia; the 1998 drama The Net (based on the Sandra Bullock movie), the 2008 Julianna Margulies law drama Canterbury's Law; seasons two and three of the mid-1970s acclaimed cop series Police Story, the 1977 sci-fi series Fantastic Journey; seasons one and two of the Aaron Spelling series S.W.A.T and season three of the cheesy syndicated Pamela Anderson series V.I.P.

Looking for rarely-seen comedies? How about the 1972 David Birney/Meredith Baxter comedy Bridget Loves Bernie? Plus both seasons of the 1994 Jon Lovitz animated series The Critic; 2014's Bad Teacher; both seasons of the 1974 Clifton Davis/Susan Dey/Ted Lange comedy That's My Mama; 2003's Nia Vardalos/Andrea Martin series My Big Fat Greek Life; the 1973 comedy The Girl With Something Extra; both seasons of the 1999 Matt Frewer series Doctor, Doctor; 2011's Matthew Perry/Jorge Garcia/Andrea Anders sports comedy Mr. Sunshine; 1986's Melbas Moore sitcom Melba; the 1977 Bewitched spin-off Tabitha; 1999's Jaleel White/Soleil Moon Frye comedy The Grown Ups; 1983's All In The Family spin-off Gloria; all three seasons of the Eddie Murphy stop-action comedy The PJ's; the 1966 business comedy Occasional Wife; season one of the 1995 Tea Leoni/Taylor Holland series The Naked Truth; 1976's Sanford & Son spin-off Grady;  and season one of the Thomas Haden Church/Debra Messing/Greg Germann sitcom Ned & Stacey.

There are also obscure animated kids shows, such as seasons three and four of The Jackie Chan Adventures, 1990's The Karate Kid, 1986's The Real Ghostbusters; 1973's Jeannie and 1974's Partridge Family 2200 A.D.

This is a lineup that probably includes as many obscure TV shows as you'll find scattered across all of the other major streaming services combined. Still, there are some weird issues with missing episodes. There are only four random episodes of the 1984 Jason Bateman/Garrett Morris comedy It's Your Move (out of the 18 episode season).

But this is an amazing lineup, even if it's wrapped inside the generally clunky Crackle interface. It's also frustrating, because it makes me wonder why HBO Max or Peacock or Paramount+ have not taken advantage of their large catalogs of content and made an effort to launch a classic/obscure TV vertical. I understand that a lot of shows have music rights issues or other problems that make some shows difficult to stream But the Crackle library - imperfect as it might be - shows there are plenty of shows that can be streamed. And for whatever reason, no one has stepped up to make it happen.

Crackle isn't the ideal home for hard-core obscure TV fans. It's not even a decent experience some of the time. But it does show that there are plenty of TV shows that COULD be available for streaming. If only someone would just step up and take the risk.

If I were consulting with Crackle, I would encourage them to lean into the rare TV genre of streaming. Improve the user experience and become the go-to destination for viewers looking for the TV equivalent of Turner Classic Movies.