Any "Ask Harriet" fans? (gallery)

[Alana]

I wanted to ask if there are any fans of "Ask Harriet" out there, the best crossdressing sitcom ever. I've written some "Ask Harriet" fanfiction, and I'm always looking for an audience.

[Betty]

I never heard of it, so I looked it up.

"The series revolved around a sexist sports journalist named Jack Cody. After being fired from his job, Jack decides to apply for the job of advice columnist. To hide his true identity, Jack dresses in drag and poses as Sylvia Coco. Jack is rehired and forced to dress as a woman to keep his new job.

Ask Harriet premiered as a midseason replacement on Sunday, January 4, 1998, and was then moved to its regular timeslot on Thursdays. After airing only five of the thirteen episodes produced, the series was canceled due to low ratings."

No wonder I never heard of it. It only aired on TV for 5 weeks, during the years I was working 50-70 hour work weeks, so had very little time for TV.

[Alana]

I seem to be the only fan of this excellent crossdressing sitcom. So here go the photos. I hope you like them.

[Alana]

~

[mayatoronto]

Just wondering where I can watch episodes of this?

[Betty]

The looks of these seem to be copies of poor quality VHS tapes, then very poorly digitized. I see there's a copyright takedown of the 5 episodes on YouTube. Why would they demand a takedown for copyrights if nobody is gonna run the series anyway? Not on the torrents either.

Some of the images above were almost 1/2mb PNGs. I converted & replaced them with 12-25kb jpg versions instead. PNGs are meant for modifiable graphics in the 1990s for magazine covers & pix. PNG tends to be too wasteful or bloated for web use -- and even worse for forum use. I also tried to brighten & sharpen them a little too, but there wasn't much to work with.

One of the most popular trends at Betty's is during America & UK daytime hours (we're international), when people are out & on the go, more than half to 2/3 of our visitors are here on portable mobile devices.

Rather than a "home" connection, most of these devices have limited mobile connection speeds, bandwidth, with bandwidth caps where they pay by the GB per month for usage. Betty's is attractive to those on the go in the day & for people in remote or rural locations with limited or capped connections, because we're very light on their connection's data usage.

So opening up a single thread with several megabytes of PNG images does not make them happy. They do not want to be surprised by suddenly running out of their data for the month, or be shocked by next month's data bill.

This is also why I warn about our movie & TV show file sizes before they get there, & keep them at phenomenally small file sizes for the quality presented. Yep, we run an auto-play music feed on our front page, but it's only 4-5mb for 40 minutes of music. People on portables don't expect that kind of usage opening up a thread & looking at pix or stories at Betty's. We're highly rated as very mobile & portable friendly, & it shows in our recently unusually high rankings/ratings, & traffic.

It's the only real competition we have against mega giants & social networks, where people can use up 200-250mb of their bandwidth by visiting Facebook or Yahoo's front page just once. And we don't send their portable's CPU (processor) or RAM into overload by visiting us either. You shouldn't need a quad core with 8gb of RAM on your phone just to do some light reading, look at some pix, & play a song. We like to be easy on our users & their devices.

I searched around for the show. So far all I see is short preview clips, or episodes removed due to copyright takedowns. If FOX won't run it, won't distribute or sell it, why take down anybody willing to run it free? If they're not gonna sell it, or let anybody see it anyway, what difference could it possibly make if someone posts a poor VHS copy of the episodes?

[Alana]

There are two episodes available on YouTube. Surprise, Surprise:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKg1TyCiohc
 
and Good for the Goose ( good for the gender ):
   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTTT3YaDb80
   
Actually, all 13 episodes are available online, but dubbed into another language. Well, the appeal of the series isn't really its dialogue. I think the best episode is the pilot. Sorry you won't be able to understand what's being said. Hit slow download and it should load ( eventually ) to your desktop:
   
https://www.ulozto.net/!BGuCA8n9/ask-harriet-1x01-pilot-avi
   

[Betty]

Thanks. At first after seeing the previews, & reading the reviews, I wasn't that interested in it. But after I found out is was unavailable anywhere, I really wanted to see it.

It's probably no big deal, but if it's unavailable, that makes it a rare collectable.

I'll probably merge all the parts of the English YouTube versions (I downloaded them) into a single full episode, & try to enhance them (if possible) before I watching them. The non-english versions seem like they're Russian.

I cheated to download those fast. I opened up 3 different browsers & had them all download an episode at the same time. So I was downloading 3 at a time. It took less than an hour to download all 13 of them that way on a slow DSL connection. Then I deleted the Russian ones that were copies of the English episodes.

I can get by understanding a few words here & there in most common languages, to at least get a general idea as to what they're talking about, unfortunately Russian isn't one of them where I know some of the words.

[Alana]

I do have three of the five episodes that aired on DVD, including the pilot. In English. The other two aren't that great, anyway. The writing isn't that funny, which is probably why the show didn't go anywhere. Or it could be anti-transgender prejudice, though that didn't seem to harm the movie Tootsie any. Anthony Tyler Quinn really makes a gorgeous woman.