Spaced Finally Makes It to North America on DVD

North American fans of British comedy are in for a long-awaited treat as Spaced is finally being released for the North American market – an actual region 1, NTSC box set. Fans of the show know what this means. They’ve been waiting, and clamoring for it, for almost ten years now.

If you don’t have British friends who actually bring their PAL TV and their DVD collection all the way across the Atlantic with them and won’t shut up about how you have to see this amazing show until you finally give in and let them show it to you, you may not be familiar with Spaced. If so, you’re in for an even greater treat. The Channel 4 comedy series was the early breakout show for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who would go on to make Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. (Pegg also plays Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek reboot.)

In Spaced, Pegg plays Tim, an all around slacker who needs a place to live. He meets Daisy (co-creator Jessica Stevenson) in a cafe while they’re both going through the classified ads. They’ve found a promising ad, but the landlady will only rent to couples. Both are coming off bad relationships and, though they’ve never met before, they really want the apartment. So Tim and Daisy strike a deal, present themselves as a couple and share the flat. From there, things get… odd.

Nick Frost plays Tim’s best friend Mike, who fancies himself a kind of British Rambo, but can’t actually get into the army and has had to settle for joining the Territorial Army, the UK’s equivalent of the National Guard. The rest of the building turns out to be full of equally odd people, especially Marsha, the drunk, chain-smoking landlady; and Brian, the deranged artist who lives downstairs. (Daisy’s best friend Twist isn’t exactly normal herself.)

But what makes Spaced brilliant isn’t the fairly standard “bunch of eccentrics” setup. Tim and Mike are movie and comic book geeks, steeped in pop culture, the kind of guys who relate everything they see to something else they saw in a movie somewhere. And that’s just what the show does. Watch an episode long enough and you start to realize that the whole thing is getting filtered through some kind of weird genre lens. Wholly apart from the frequent fantasy cutaways, almost every scene turns out to be some kind of weird riff on anything from Star Wars to Resident Evil to John Woo action films. Spaced is the world as experienced through its characters’ brilliant, but very easily distracted, minds and the result is hilarious.

Spaced is a joyous romp for the geek in all of us. It’s the kind of show you can watch eight times in a row and still be picking up new things the eighth time through. And ultimately, it’s a show that makes it easy to truly care about its odd yet sweet characters. Bizarre as they may be, you quickly become surprisingly close to them. You root for them in their battles, and rejoice as they find bits of happiness and decency in their crazy world.

The problem is, until now, you’ve mostly had to do this in the UK. Spaced was originally produced in 1999 and, for whatever reason, it’s never gotten a Region 1, NTSC release on DVD for North America before. There were hopes that, as Simon Pegg’s career took off, the producers would want to cash in on his fame and release the show in North America. But since it had never actually aired here, they presumably didn’t believe there was a market. There was even a recent plan to mount an American remake of the series, to be directed by McG (Charlie’s Angels). Fans were mortified by this idea – there’s just no way the charm of the show could survive the translation, much less the necessary recasting.

But that project appears to have stalled, and the powers that be have finally seen the light. A box set of the complete series was released for the North American market on July 22, 2008. It’s worth checking out. While it’s been out on disc in Britain forever, on the other side of the Atlantic, Spaced is a lost treasure that’s finally available to those of us without pushy British friends.