Spaced Out

Some of you who've read this site or its predecessor for some time might remember how much I love Shaun of the Dead--not only is it a cinematic love letter to the films of George Romero and a laugh-out-loud romantic comedy, but it's a sly social satire, with characters so narcissistic that they can't stop navel-gazing long enough to notice the dead rising all around them.

What I didn't know at the time was that the creators of that film--director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Jessica Stevenson--had done a sitcom together in the UK called Spaced, in which Pegg and Stevenson played flatmates who found themselves in all sorts of zany situations with their circle of oddball friends, including Frost as some weird army dude.

Unfortunately, knowing something exists and actually finding it are two different things.

It hadn't run on any of my local PBS stations (since I live in Chicago, I have access to three) like most British comedies do--why could I find endless reruns of Are You Being Served?, As Time Goes By and Monty Python's Flying Circus, but no Spaced? It popped up briefly on BBC America in an odd timeslot--somewhere south of 10 p.m.--and I only found it long enough to catch a couple of episodes before it vanished again, replaced the following week by Coupling, which had in fact run on at least one of my local PBS stations and about which I could not have possibly care less short of being declared legally deceased.

What little I saw of Spaced on BBC America was smartly written, sharply acted and laced with more pop culture references than you could look up on Wikipedia in as much time. This made me want to see the whole series that much more.

Spaced was also frustratingly just out of reach via DVD--it was available in Region 2 format (which works in the UK), but not Regions 0 or 1 (which work here). I could When I found out an old friend was watching the Region 2 DVDs (maybe she had an all-region player?), I posted on her MySpace page: "Why isn't this available on DVD stateside yet? Who do I have to blow to make this happen?"

The answer, as it turns out, was "no one"--an American DVD release of Spaced was already in the works. In fact, it was released yesterday.

You would think this would put an end to the quest. Not quite.

I tried looking first at actual stores like F.Y.E. and Laurie's Planet of Sound, but neither had it in stock. Borders did, but at 20% off--sounds good, until you consider that Cook County now has the highest sales tax in the country, so that's really only 9.75% off. Not good enough.

To avoid the drastically high sales tax while still getting what I want in a more-or-less timely manner, I ordered the Spaced box set off of Amazon. Free shipping. No sales tax. And it shipped today. Sweetness.