Just when you thought they would be out of ideas for reality TV, the folks at A&E come up with a show like Intervention, which airs Sunday nights at 9pm Central time.

This show is as addicting as the gambling and drugs its participants are hooked on. Once you start, you can’t stop watching it.

The premise of the show is that the participants volunteer to do a documentary on addiction and the cameras follow them around as they talk about their behavior. The have no idea that the whole point is to get them into a room with their loved ones and push them into rehab.

The most disturbing episode thus far was episode 2, about a 31 year old man named Gabe who was a compulsive gambler. His view on life was that it was his parents “obligation” to pay his debts. These parents mortgaged their house to help pay his $500,000 gambling debts and the guy still wasn’t satisfied. The guy threw nothing short of temper tantrums every time he didn’t get his way. It was the most painful example of someone who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions that I had ever seen. You have to keep an eye out for reruns of this episode. It’s amazingly disturbing.

The only episode I’ve missed so far is the one on video game addiction. I’m keeping my eye out for that one.

Oh, big news. I’ve been asked to participate in a show documentary about blogging. I’ll let you know how that goes …

Browsing through Suncoast Video yesterday, we found that Quantum Leap – The Complete Third Season has been released to DVD.

This show, during the time that it was on, was my absolute favorite on TV. The third season includes the two part “The Leap Home” episodes, where Sam leaps back into himself when he is 16 in part one to win a basketball game. During this time he tries to save his father and brother from dying.

The second part of the episode, Sam leaps into a member of his brothers squad in Viet Nam, where he tries to prevent Toms death on April 8, 1969.

These are the two episodes we got through last night. I’m hoping to keep chipping away at the set through the rest of the week.

We found the set quite a bit cheaper over at Wal-mart, so you might want to check there before hitting the usual channels (unless of course you want to click one of the links above and give me a cut of your purchase). 😉

Johnny Carson passed away this morning at the age of 79.

I can’t tell you how much I used to look forward to The Tonight Show back when he was the host. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve actually watched the show since May of 1992.

He was definitely a one of a kind and it was a sad day when he left television.

There is more information available at CNN.com, an article on E-Online and one more on msnbc.com.

Update:
CNN has Your Johnny Carson Memories, which is a pretty cool tribute. Some of the moments we all enjoyed are mentioned in this one.

Yesterday we were out at Spring Hill Mall and made our usual obligatory stop at SunCoast when we found Millennium: The Complete Second Season sitting out in the new releases section. We also found The X-Files – The Complete First Season for half off. The X-Files is another one of those shows we really liked, but the DVD sets have just been too expensive to buy.

This comes on the heels of finding Quantam Leap Season 2 in stores as mentioned previously. I think we’re covered as far as the “500 channels and nothing to watch but reality TV” syndrome that we’ve been suffering from lately.

I think the release of old TV favorites is probably my favorite part of the DVD revolution. I find it so cool to be able to sit down whenever I feel like it and pop in one of these shows.

Quantum Leap – The Complete Second Season was released recently to DVD. This was my favorite show "back in the day", and I would make sure I was home to watch it every Wednesday. I just didn’t know what to do when it switched to Friday’s and was on at the same time as Americas Most Wanted – my other favorite show at the time.

Boy, this reminds me of the time when watching TV was actually something you looked forward to doing. I’m SO tired of reality TV shows at this point. It’s all you find these days …

I have been waiting for what seems like forever for the DVD release of Seinfeld to happen. I am one of those people who get to be a fan of a show the last season it is on the air. I started watching Seinfeld religiously during the second to last season and before I knew it, the show had run its course.

Since it has been in syndication, we have watched it nightly on TBS. I initially thought that the first three seasons were ones that I had never seen. It wound up, that I have seen almost all of them.

However, the DVD sets are still worth it. There are a lot of interviews with Larry David and the cast and crew of the show that were really fun to watch. The most interesting thing to me as we were watching all of the extras were how much of the shows came out of the real life experiences of the writers and were not just made up situations that "would never happen". This one thing in and of itself facinated me enough to renew my interest in the show as a whole.

Extras include a “Making of” documentary in three parts, interviews with the cast and crew, "Inside Looks" on almost every episode, commentaries by the cast and writers, and many more.

One of the really fun to watch extras in the set was called "Kramer vs. Kramer" which shows the evolution of the Kramer character from the real life Kenny Kramer to the character we know as “Cosmo Kramer”. This was also a very interesting section of the DVD, especially the inside look at just how seriously Michael Richards took his work.

Watching these sets was a great way to spend the long Thanksgiving weekend. These two boxes are a great gift for any Seinfeld fan.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go spend some time walking around to get the blood flowing back to my lower extremities. Three seasons of anything is too much time to spend sitting down!