The show ran for 26 seasons and now has been canceled with the last episode airing August 31st? I don’t understand. Someone rescue me from this nightmare?
What will replace it if anything? Who has the straight dope?
Wha? 26 seasons. I’v never even heard of this show.
It was on ITV1 in Great Britain. I would dl from usenet. I don’t think it was ever on any US channels - even the few UK satellite channels you can get here.
You can still find episodes on usenet if your provider has a long enough retention period. I like Giganews but it’s at least $20 per month I think. I get their premium package which I think is $30-40 - but i do download a lot of video and they keep binary posts for about 3 years now I think.
As they begin releasing the DVD’s (started last year with Season 1), you will be able to get them again and there is a chance they will post episodes on their web site - haven’t looked into that yet.
I started watching about 4 years ago so I would be interested in anything from season 22 back. However I looked at the season 1 dvd’s and they were painful to watch. Color sucks, sets suck. Has the look and feel of an 80’s soap opera.
Have to disagree with you there dzero. I love the early episodes, I have watched a few recently and they are still good. The focus was on interesting but realistic characters and police procedure. From memory, The Bill went crap about 12 years ago - they introduced eye-candy characters and ridiculous story lines. The whole Eddie Santini storyline was eye-rollingly bad. There were still some decent episodes after that, but it got even sillier.
What I am saying it that the Bill has been dead for a while, or at least slowly dying. Its original purpose has long been abandoned and it is just another soap opera.
When it was a police procedural, dealing with the problems the London Police were actually experiencing in the real world, it was a great show. That era lasted for 15 years.
Then they tried to make it more exciting by turning it into a relationship soap opera, with everybody sleeping with each other. I abandoned it then.
It tried to get back on its feet, but it was competing with so many other gritty and realistic Police-oriented shows that they couldn’t find the right compromise to win their audiences back, and it all fell apart. It’s a mercy killing.
Weird, the story you guys are telling about this show The Bill is eerily similar to the story one could tell about the American show Law and Order.
Seriously. The L&O emo and soap opera aspects component got dialed up to 11, and the quasi-realistic “ripped from the headlines” story lines and procedural aspects of the story got shorter shrift over time. I haven’t bothered to watch an L&O in a long time.
Manwich got it in one. Every couple of years in the last decade there would be an announcement that the writers were going to take it back to being story driven and away from being about the characters’ private lives. In other words make it more police drama and less soap opera.
Unfortunately it never happened. It is sad, because in its prime it was one of my favourite shows.
I loved it in its earliest incarnation, hated it when it went soap, but found the love for it again in its last phase. But I guess it returned to its former glory too late. I’ll miss it.