State of the Blog: screeners, comps, features, labels, OWF

Last month I've had success with my ongoing quest to get hold of screeners. The BBC, Channel 4, Sky and FX have all now agreed to provide me with preview discs before transmission, which will definitely help me manage my time more effectively. However, in some instances I prefer to wait for regular broadcasts (the benefits of HD, say), and I probably won't request screeners for episodes between premieres and finales very often. There's still something to be said for the communal feeling of watching TV at the same time as the rest of the nation, don't you agree? But being able to spend a week or so refining my thoughts about a particular show's premiere/finale will be fantastic.I'm now unsure about my original intention to write previews (I opted against that with Vexed in the end), because the response wasn't great about my intent. People told me they probably wouldn't comment on previews because they haven't seen the show themselves yet (so what can they say of any real value), or would avoid such previews (even if there were a guarantee of no spoilers). Is that the consensus of opinion? Is there nothing to be said for previews building interesting in something, driving audiences towards a show they might otherwise have missed, or helping viewers avoid bad shows? I did preview No Ordinary Family, a whole month before transmission, and that seemed to go down quite well. But maybe only from people who had likewise downloaded it? Thoughts? Competitions should be back more regularly, after an extended break that only occurred because doing contests is additional work I don't always want to take on. Summer laziness, really.You may also have noticed I've amended my Label Cloud to show every single label/tag available at DMD. I usually edit the Cloud to only show the most popular labels, mainly for TV shows that are still active on-air. I just thought it might be nice to show everything for awhile, so people can perhaps discover some of the older posts -- for shows/features that are now history. This probably won't be a permanent change, so use it while you can.Finally, I started my second tenure at Obsessed With Film on Saturday, with a few news pieces and a review of Aussie drama Spirited going live over the weekend. I'll continue to post links to much of the OWF content; I'm just unsure if daily links or a weekly round-up is best. Opinions? Premiere reviews for Him & Her, Mad Men and Merlin will be this week's definite OWF exclusives, so stay tuned for those! Here's a direct link to my writing there, author-specific.

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