On December 13, 2002, I paid $10 for admission to the Museum of Television & Radio, now known as the Paley Center for Media (the Museum of Broadcasting, originally), in New York City. It had multiple theaters and screening rooms as well as a listening room, and before YouTube's arrival in the spring of '05, the viewing library of a museum like this one was, unless you already had it on an old VHS or Betamax tape, the only place to see an HBO comedy special like David Letterman: Looking for Fun (1981).
The museum's "Seminar Series" boasted truly exclusive material, like a recording of a panel discussion with Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, and other members of the team behind Comedy Central's Strangers With Candy (1999-2000), although the discussion and the series's unaired original pilot, which I also watched that December day, would soon be included as bonus features on DVD sets for the show.
Moonlighting was my favorite show growing up, so I'd already seen the first-season episode "The Next Murder You Hear" multiple times, but maybe I thought the MT&R's copy would include the commercials from its original broadcast on ABC on March 19, 1985. Or maybe I just wanted to revisit the episode in which Moonlighting began to feel like nothing else on TV at the time. (Bottom line: More than 20 years later, I can't remember why I checked this episode out. My time in the viewing library was limited to two hours and 15 minutes, so I wasn't able to watch everything in full.)













