Where Are The Carol Burnett Show Reruns?

In a Time when Carol Burnett's Classic 1960's-1970's Variety Show Reruns Are Needed More Than Ever on TV, It's Too Bad They're Only Available Through a Special Mail-Order Club

Those of us lucky enough to remember the original run of "The Carol Burnett Show" remember when we used to watch the syndicated reruns of the show ("Carol Burnett & Friends") and wished they'd show the original full hour and not sliced down to a more syndication-worthy half-hour format with just the sketches. That's how we remember seeing the reruns of the series starting in the early 1980's on local stations on through to some point into the 90's and the early 2000's when they aired on TBS and TV Land. After that brief run on TV Land, Carol Burnett, who owned all the shows, pulled "Carol Burnett & Friends" from TV after nearly twenty years in syndication and subsequently created a vast hole in the rerun TV comedy universe.

Certainly people could have used the huge guffaws reruns of the series were still generating right around the time they were pulled. Other than a few excellent reunion specials in the 90's and 2000's featuring Carol, Tim Conway, (the late) Harvey Korman and Vicki Lawrence, the dark beginning of the 21 century didn't have the pleasure of having one of the funniest variety shows in history anywhere in the vast cable TV universe.

Well, only if you happened to be up late at night and watching infomercials did you realize a few years later that Carol Burnett and most of the original cast reunited and produced an infomercial selling the original series on specially-produced DVD's as part of a mail-order club.

That's not exactly how "The Carol Burnett Show" started on DVD, though. "Carol Burnett & Friends" was still in its syndication run when Carol Burnett made a deal with Columbia House to put out some select episodes (this time the full one-hour episodes) on VHS and DVD. Many people hadn't seen the full one-hour shows in years, but you had to sign up to be a member of Columbia House in order to acquire the DVD's. Many people have had problems with Columbia House's mail-order clubs for years, though it didn't prevent a lot of people from taking a chance acquiring those original Burnett shows since it was likely they'd never be shown on TV again in their original one-hour format.