“Eyes” in Reprise

I wasn’t a big fan of Eyes, the 2005 ABC-TV mid-season replacement series about a high-priced, high-tech, and certainly high-strung private investigations firm “functioning on the fringes of the law,” as The Seattle Times put it. Which was odd, because I usually go for P.I. shows, even when they’re of marginal dramatic quality. And I like actor Tim Daly (formerly of Wings and The Fugitive), who played Harlan Judd, the president of Judd Risk Management. Yet I recall seeing only one or two of the five episodes that were broadcast before ABC suddenly yanked Eyes from its Wednesday night schedule (despite a well-publicized campaign to save the show).

Still, I am happy to read in TV Squad that eight episodes of the series are now available online at AOL’s In2TV--“that’s three new episodes for those of you keeping track,” explains TV Squader Anna Johns. Original fans of the series (which also starred Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, Laura Leighton, and Rick Worthy) can now see plot lines wrapped up a bit more, and the rest of us can give Eyes another look. American TV networks are so obsessed with profit these days, and so fearful that they will make the wrong programming decisions, that they’re willing to pull promising shows even before audiences have had a chance to find them, much less bond with them. So the Web, which is already hosting repeats of new shows and myriad clips from vintage ones, provides an ideal vehicle for resurrecting series that weren’t given a reasonable chance the first time around.

Maybe after Eyes and the other current In2TV “gone but not forgotten” series (including The George Carlin Show and the Rhea Perlman-Malcolm McDowell comedy, Pearl) have been up for a while, the site could resurrect such regrettably short-shrifted TV efforts as Banyon, Jigsaw, Leg Work, The Magician, Archer, Ellery Queen, City of Angels, and The Snoop Sisters.