I wonder how many people know that tonight is the season finale of the first run of Doctor Who that’s been on television since the last century.

You certainly wouldn’t have any reason to know it in the states. If you ever look at the listings for BBC America, it’s obvious that the People in Charge over there think that Americans want:

– Reruns of the bad episodes of the Avengers (those without Diana Rigg as Emma Peel)

– The same old episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (a show we ‘mericans all pretend to understand, but really don’t – at all – period)

– Millions of Benny Hill reruns – around the clock – all day, every day

I don’t have any idea how they determined the lineup, but it’s awful. BBC America is like a dumping ground for the BBC archives.

Sure, I’m exaggerating the lameness of BBCA, but not by much. It’s a real stinker of a channel.

And to think they could have shown the first season of this new Doctor Who series, which just happens to be the best since Tom Baker hung his scarf up in his closet and walked off into obscurity. The stories are still lame as hell, but they’re offset by the higher quality characters and effects. Christopher Eccleston has kicked so much Doctor Who bootay that going back and watching the older episodes hurts (the Tom Baker years excepted).

And still, all we have over here is Benny Hill and a poorly co-starred Patrick McNee with huge lamb-chops erupting from beneath his bowler and taking over his face like a sort of intelligent hairy fungus.

People change. I’ve had some very harsh stances concerning file sharing programs like bittorrent, but with no other way to view the new Doctor Who series, and with the first episode intentionally leaked over bittorrent, I’ve had a hard time stopping myself from grabbing the shows as they’ve appeared. The temptation of hearing the slicing 30hz rasp of a metal box screaming “EXTERMINATE” has proven too much for me. I am a criminal.

It makes me wonder what television studios are thinking. The new Battlestar Galactica is a good example. Released first in the UK, the entire series was available via bittorrent before the third episode had played on ‘merican screens. I respect the desire to control distribution, but it’s pretty obvious now that the viewers have decided how they’d like to receive their broadcasts, and they’re voting with their file sharing clients.

I read a few interviews with the Man Behind the New Galactica, and his concern over file sharing systems like bittorrent was simply that there was no way to track viewers.

The answer to this seems so simple that I’m sure I’m missing something, but what the heck: Why not release a version of the show over bittorrent that:

– Contains commercials (they have to pay for this somehow)

– Contains several “nag” spots reminding people to go to a website where they could click a button that would increment a counter, making it possible to approximate the number of people who get the show over the net (I’d be willing to do this in exchange for the convenience)

– Is released a week after the show has already played so the stations airing the show don’t feel short-changed – also include a small spot at the beginning which says something to the effect of “If you had been watching this on [Station X] then you wouldn’t be a week behind”

Seems sane. Seems smart.

Back in the day, a studio could decide to release a show in the UK and not the states; a studio could release the show in multiple countries but with different play dates. Not now, though. There’s no point. If you tell us that a show is going to be released in the UK and then played in America three months later, the people with the means (and there are a lot of ‘em now) aren’t going to wait. There’s this whole high-speed worldwide network of publicly accessible machines to consider, you know?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the last episode of the season, which is also the last episode starring Eccleston. His tenure as the Doctor was way too short. When it’s over, I suppose I’ll go back to watching what the execs think I want: old grainy reruns of Brits dressing up as women and holding potato sack races while singing songs about spam and other silliness.

Sigh.