All 11 Seasons of THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW Now On Amazon Prime

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 5/28/20 at 11:06am

I just discovered late last night that EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of the series is now streaming on Prime. I never thought wed get to see the entire series as a whole so this is pretty amazing!

[nasty_khakis]

Posted: 5/28/20 at 11:39am

Do things seem majorly edited? From my limited understanding, the issue of getting it on DVD and streaming was all the music used was a rights nightmare. Glad it seems to have been straightened out!

[Kimbo]

Posted: 5/28/20 at 11:41am

Jordan Catalano said: "I just discovered late last night that EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of the series is now streaming on Prime. I never thought wed get to see the entire series as a whole so this is pretty amazing!"

They're not complete, and unfortunately, as one would expect, the biggest casualty, due to rights issues, is many of the big musical numbers.  But still good news nonetheless, and better than nothing.  From an article this month on Vulture:

"There is one important asterisk attached to the Burnett news: The episodes streaming will be the half-hour syndicated version of the program and not the full hour-long editions broadcast on CBS until 1978. Most of the big musical-production numbers were cut when reruns moved to syndication, both because of time (local stations preferred a shorter format) and because of rights issues. Burnett supervised the editing of her episodes back in the late 1970s, and most of her sketches survived. In some cases, she and her producers combined bits from different episodes to make sure the best stuff wasn’t completely lost. (That’s why the syndicated and Shout! collection includes 291 episodes versus the 279 from the CBS run.)

I asked Burnett last year whether we’d ever see the restored episodes, complete with musical numbers, hit streaming or TV again, and she wasn’t hopeful. “The cost is prohibitive,” she said, referring to music licensing. “We did some pretty elaborate and miraculous medleys. We would take a composer, like Gershwin or Cole Porter, and we would make a story out of their music. Like an opera. We called them mini-musicals, and they were just wonderful and funny. But now, I don’t think we could get clearance from the Rodgers and Hammerstein estates and things like that.” Peisch explains that some of Burnett’s medleys would have as many as 25 songs in them, making getting the rights to stream said music both time-consuming and expensive. “If we did the hour-long shows, it would mean getting thousands of songs cleared,” he said. Nonetheless, Shout! did get some songs cleared — enough for about 300 or so musical performances to be included in the package, mostly from the show’s earlier seasons."

https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/netflix-subscription-surge.html

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 5/28/20 at 11:43am

Oh that’s good to know. Thanks for that. 

Updated On: 5/28/20 at 11:43 AM

[BCfitasafiddle]

Posted: 5/28/20 at 12:48pm

Oh my gosh! This is great, thank you for the heads up.

[carnzee]

Posted: 5/28/20 at 1:11pm

Yes, these are the heavily edited syndicated reruns. But these are the versions I grew up with in the '90s, so it's not like I know what I'm missing. The only way to see the hour long originals is to buy Time Life DVDs, I believe.

I'm happy to see these, edited or not.