Reruns! Once upon a time they were the bane of TV viewers. Now, we spend vast numbers of online hours looking for the great TV shows of yore. Many times we find them…others, well, not so much:
by Alyssa Rosenberg
When I graduated from college and got cable for the first time, I discovered the wonderful world of reruns. And so, long before binging TV shows became an actual sociological phenomenon, I regularly fell into happy fugue states with the “Law & Order” franchise, and with “Living Single,” Yvette Lee Bowser’s brilliant sitcom about a group of friends living in New York, starring Queen Latifah as magazine editor Khadijah James.
But when I got a “Living Single” craving last week, I discovered something frustrating: The series isn’t streaming anywhere, and only the first of the show’s five seasons is available on a DVD release. “Living Single” is every bit as sprawling and funny as “Friends” or “How I Met Your Mother,” and its female characters beat “Sex and the City” to the spiky, complicated punch by five years. But if you wanted to watch the whole thing, start to finish, and to watch it in order, you’d have to DVR the TV One reruns and assemble the episodes in order yourself.