I just got Early Edition: The Second Season today, it had been on my Wish List for while now, and finally decided to get it. If you are not familiar with this show, you can read about it HERE.
This show ran on CBS from 1996-2000. The main character is Gary (Kyle Chandler). His wife kicked him out of the house, so he moved into a hotel room. Shortly thereafter, he starts receiving the Chicago Sun-Times every day, a subscription he n ever ordered always comes with the same orange cat. Turns out that it’s TOMORROW’S paper, delivered a day early.
Gary’s pal, Chuck (Fisher Stevens) wants to use the information in the paper for personal gain (buying stocks, playing the horses, the lottery, etc). But Gary wants to use the paper for good, so every week’s show was about Gary going around saving people from fires, accidents, and other bad things. And after he does his good deeds, he sees the story in the paper change right before his eyes - a headline that says 10 PEOPLE DIE IN FIRE, changes to 10 PEOPLE SAVED FROM FIRE. Although there were one or two occasions when Gary needed money, and he did use the paper for his own personal gain, it was not something he wanted to make a practice of.
Gary is joined in his adventures by another good friend, Marissa (Shanésia Davis-Williams). Later in the series, he buys McGinty’s Bar, where he and his friends like to hang out, and gets a love interest in the person of Erica (Kristy Swanson), a bar employee.
This was one of those shows that the whole family could watch, there’s no swearing, sex, or violence. It’s a truly enjoyable show, the sort we seldom see anymore.
I seriously hope they will follow through and release the final two seasons on DVD. It’s always a source of annoyance when I’m collecting a TV series, and they either take forever to release later seasons, or just never bother to release them at all.
So, what would YOU do if you got tomorrow’s paper today? Would you become a do-gooder like Gary, or would you be more like Chuck and want to use it for personal gain? Or maybe a little of both? If you work, say, as a low-paid clinislim review writer, maybe arranging to win the Powerball jackpot would be okay. I’d probably do that. But I’d feel better about it if I used some of the money to help others, donate to charity, etc.
