Remember when I wrote an article for the print magazine about the DVD release of the show Hill Street Blues? No? Well, I did. And now I should follow that up by mentioning that despite the amazing boost in sales undoubtedly caused by my deigning to mention it (I'm told that at least two people have bought stuff because I said it was good), the first two seasons didn't sell well and Fox has decided not to release the rest of the series.

This is the dark side of the TV on DVD boom: a show may get one, two, even three seasons released, but if it doesn't perform according to the studio's expectations, it'll be yanked from the DVD release schedule and fans will be frustrated: we bought the first two seasons, and now we can't get the last five?

Other shows that have been more or less abandoned include ones you might have expected to sell well, like (among recent shows) Everwood, and (among classic shows) Taxi, which got three seasons and may never get the final two seasons out on DVD.

This happens mostly with releases by big studios, because they run off a lot of copies and ship lots of copies to the big retail dealers; if a show doesn't sell really, really well, they'll be left with a lot of unsold product and won't feel it's profitable to release the other seasons. Independent DVD producers have lower overhead and lower production runs, so they're more likely to release a whole series -- though even they can sometimes feel compelled to abandon a series if it sells really badly.

You can't blame a studio for not releasing a show if they're not making money on it; that's why it's called show "business." But it is frustrating to start collecting a series only to find that you've sort of wasted your money. Especially when the first season isn't as good as the later ones, and you're mostly buying the first season to help make sure the studio releases the later episodes. I bought the first season of Night Court, which isn't as good as the subsequent seasons (not as bad as the final three seasons, though, but that's another story), mostly because I wanted so badly for Warner Brothers to keep on releasing the seasons and I wanted to do my bit to get the episodes I really liked. But of course the first season didn't sell -- in part because many fans of the show didn't want the first season -- and the later, better episodes will probably never see the light of day. And yet as a TV-on-DVD collector you really don't have much choice but to get the first season; unless a lot of people buy the first season, that's all there's going to be. Is a puzzlement.