Want to see more "Torchwood"? Starting next year, you'll need premium Starz, not just digital-basic BBC America, to do it.
Yet as much as I love each of them, those are all niche shows, so-called cult hits that might never have made it as far as they have in a TV universe paid for entirely through advertising.
Without enough of an audience to attract the kind of advertising money that pays for quality, I'm grateful someone's figured out any way at all to keep them in production.
But the divide between so-called free TV and its pricey cousins widens dramatically this week as Starz launches the U.S. premiere of "The Pillars of the Earth," a $30 million, eight-hour miniseries about the construction of a 12th-century cathedral that will play out over six consecutive summer Fridays, beginning and ending with two back-to-back episodes.
Based on the 1989 international best-seller by Ken Follett, which has sold more than 6 million copies in the U.S. alone - and continues to sell about 100,000 paperbacks a year - "Pillars" isn't the miniseries we have come to expect from, say, HBO, which shelled out a reported $195 million for "The Pacific," Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's follow-up to "Band of Brothers."
Instead, it's the kind of sweeping, old-fashioned miniseries you might have grown up seeing on a network like ABC, which brought Alex Haley's "Roots" to the small screen, as well as Colleen McCullough's "The Thorn Birds" and the Herman Wouk sagas "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance."
