The Man does something without fucking it up too much.

I'm usually pretty wary of most attempts to undermine the popularity of stuff like YouTube or other "upstart" websites by established media companies; usually they end up being pretty lame or at least critically gimped in some way.  However, after having both benoc and Deidei mention watching a few things on hulu.com, I checked it out just to see how it was, especially because Deidei was trying to get me to watch Kitchen Confidential (vaguely based on Anthony Bourdain's book, which I really liked).  So I checked it out this weekend, since it's easy enough to leave a webpage open while I play Eve in another window or something.

Surprisingly enough, it doesn't suck too bad.  You are forced to watch brief commercials at certain points; this isn't horrible, since most shows would have them anyway and the commercials are only 15-30 seconds.  The only time it gets a little annoying is when it's a show that was originally shown on pay cable, like Total Recall 2070, where the commercial breaks can come at odd moments.  Furthermore, the selection of shows is surprisingly good.  I knew that it was a joint venture between NBC and FOX, but I forgot how many shows on other networks are done through them, and the catalog of old shows is surprisingly good as well.  They don't have full catalogs of all the shows there, but especially the one-season shows that were cancelled (like Firefly) they have there, which is nice if you wanted to see a show you heard about but didn't see, and don't want to take a chance on buying the DVDs (or the DVDs aren't available).

So far, I've gone through all of Kitchen Confidential (which was okay -- it was definitely better having read the book and being vaguely familiar with the craziness in a restaurant kitchen) and Total Recall 2070, which I only saw a few episodes of when it was in syndication.  It's worth checking out if you have some time to kill and you're bored.