That subject line refers to them as were stupid enough to cancel Lockup & as well foment the cancerous spread of a far inferior program, Dateline, across the TV spectrum. MSNBC doesn't even air Lockup reruns in disfavor of THAT garbage, which already enjoys too much overexposure at the local & national levels. But while it wasn't quite as gritty as if an HBO or Showtime had aired it - and why didn't one of them take it over? - what with all the unhelpfully bleeped out Harsh Language, still it was a slap-in-the-face revelation about the lowest-rent bipeds among us, the oftentimes unjust sentences doled out for their horrific crimes & the woeful state of the American prison system itself. They didn't go far enough with their exposures, though - this program could've gone on for another 25 seasons to bring to light situations in undocumented locations e.g. Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Billings, Boise, Cheyenne, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Little Rock - & one of the worst of the worst, old Parchman down Mississippi way. Someplace in New York other than that bloated stinkhole City, like Buffalo or Rochester, would've yielded interesting sociocultural revelations; even Raleigh - which 23 years ago I dubbed the most boring place I'd ever lived in during my happily short 14-month stay there - has an interesting penological history, documented Only Once long ago, on an episode of the even more too-short The Big House. But NO. Instead the polluted airheads at NBC - which in addition to that waste-dump Dateline have turned Oxygen into a landfill of reruns of their profoundly uninteresting Crime Dramas - dredge up as many clones of DTLN as they can, vomit out short-lived primetime junk (as they all do) & cannot be bothered to even put out a comprehensive DVD collection of Lockup for its legions of fans. Fortunately I have around 80 episodes on good old VHS & DVR, which I will go through until I can quote 'em chapter & verse before I'd stoop so low as to subject myself to the idiot overeducated ugmos & their crappy narration scripts on Dateline, or the equally vapid primetime faked "crime" shows across all networks e.g. Law & Order and their death-beaten reruns. The one "Oh!" of unexpected delight out of this wreckage that I discovered only today is that the long-uncredited Lockup narrator, Jason Hildebrandt, has gone on to do other things including a documentary on, ironically, the IDiot Channel - which operations are a whole nuther kettle of stinking fish by itself. We who gnawed on Lockup as greedily as at an ancient Roman feast now sadly have only its bones to pick over, but there's plenty of other crime documentaries, if not jail-oriented, to get our fix by. "Some beats none!"
Review of Lockup
