My Quest for Tony Tripoli and Finding TV Repeats Online

In an earlier post, Michael mentioned that Tony Tripoli guested last night on Two and a Half Men. I've been a big fan of Tony and his roommate Dennis Hensley ever since I read Hensley's hilarious book of "group film reviews" called Screening Party. Then I was thrilled to watch these two as Kathy Griffin's "best gays" on the first season of My Life On The D-List. But then they had a falling out with Kathy Griffin and didn't return for the second season. Bummer. (For Tripoli's perspective on the rift with Griffin, this article is informative.) Anyway, back to last night's Two and a Half Men episode. I've never actually watched the Charlie Sheen sitcom before, but was really excited about seeing Tripoli, so I thought I'd go on over to CBS.com and catch last night's episode there. No dice. Then I went to iTunes-- thinking surely CBS would make prior episodes of their highest-rated comedy available there. Again, no dice. I guess for CBS, Two and a Half Men repeats qualify as some sort of treasured, premium content-- more difficult to crack than the Disney vault. So I guess I'm out of luck. This disheartening experience got me to wondering how the networks stack up in terms of offering their programming online. Of the five majors (CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, CW), it looks like ABC is out in front when it comes to offering access to repeats. Here's a brief description of each network's online video offerings: At ABC, they put what seems like all their shows online the day after broadcast. For free. Their site is comparatively easy to navigate and helps you to quickly determine exactly which episodes are actually available. Sure, you have to sit through a thirty-second commercial about every 15 minutes when watching their online video, but that's actually less advertising than you'd have to sit through than if you were watching the show live on TV. You can get to the ABC video streaming landing here. The CW has a roughly equivalent set up and have many of their shows available (Veronica Mars, Supernatural, One Tree Hill among them). You can get to The CW's streaming video here. Unfortunately, they seem to be missing some of their biggest hits (Smallville, Gilmore Girls, Top Model). Fox has a pretty clear and easy to navigate set-up when it comes to online video. They provide a menu of shows and at least the most recent episodes for each. (In some instances they offer the entire season of repeats). Again, the biggest downside is, they don't provide online video for their most popular shows. No American Idol. No Simpsons. But if you get a wild hair and want to watch the entire season of The Loop then, hey, Fox.com has you covered. You can find FOX's online video menu here. CBS does provide access to the prior week's repeat for certain shows (How I Met Your Mother, Survivor: Fiji, Amazing Race: All Stars, The Class, etc.) and provides Full Season repeats of others (Jericho). The trouble is, their wonky site (something called Innertube) makes it hard to navigate and figure out what content is available. You can get to CBS online video offerings here. Finally we come to NBC. Their streaming video site is very misleading. They suck you in with promises of "full-length episodes or a two-minute replay." But I spent about twenty minutes this afternoon mucking about on their stupid site and could not find a "full episode" of anything. Here is the NBC video site. [Update -- please see Oliver's comment to this post -- apparently I didn't give NBC's site a close enough inspection -- they do have full episodes of some shows (30 Rock among them) but not others (no The Office, darn!) Still, a better offering than I initially stated.] Of course, my review above leaves out all the cable channels (Bravo, Oxygen, Comedy Central, etc.) Can anybody out there comment on cable channels that do a good job with video streaming their shows online?