You Touched Pete's Piece! Nobody Touches Pete's Piece!

Last summer, one of my favorite shows came out on DVD, a fact I realized this week, thanks to my less than impressive powers of observation. Then again, considering it took The-Powers-That-Be thirteen years to release it, a year doesn't seem so bad.

Now that I've written a paragraph about it, I should probably mention its name. The show was called The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and it lasted an entire season on Fox in 1993. It was a western-comedy-sci-fi show about a lawyer-turned-bounty-hunter who is hired by robber barons to capture a notorious gang of bandits that murdered his father, a legendary federal marshal.

Less than a decade later, another western-comedy-sci-fi show on Fox would venture into the same convention-defying territory as Brisco and suffer a similar single-season fate. That show was called Firefly. I must have mentioned it once or twice. Anyway, I don't know why I have an affinity for short-lived, offbeat shows, but I do, and I don't think I'll ever be able to quit them.

The show introduced me to Bruce Campbell. I hadn't seen The Evil Dead trilogy, so I had no idea who he was. At the time, I simply thought he was perfect as Brisco. Part of it was his constant look of bemusement, part of it was his great chemistry with the other actors, especially Julius Carry, who played Lord Bowler, and Kelly Rutherford, who played Dixie Cousins. I took an instant liking to him.

The show also introduced me to one of my favorite television theme songs. Randy Edelman wrote it and the heroic song has enjoyed greater success than the show. NBC used it during last year's Winter Olympics and I've heard it used in numerous movie trailers.

Brisco enjoyed 27 episodes of life before Fox pulled it. Since then, it has enjoyed several years of cable syndication. I'm just glad The-Powers-That-Be finally came to their senses and released the show on DVD.