Season 4, Episode 1
Date of airing: September 25, 1999 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.38 million viewers, 6.6/13 in Households, 2.7/9 with Adults 18-49
written by: Alex Taub
directed by: Gary Nelson
Did the writers' room change people again? Because otherwise, I am unable to explain to myself why they suddenly started explaining that there are multiple people receiving tomorrow's newspaper today – something the series has not gone into at all throughout the first three seasons, and something someone like Lucius Snow would have probably figured out in all of his time receiving the Chicago Sun-Times a day early (especially during his trip to Dallas in November of 1963). But this episode made it seem like this is a whole new plot development, and one that has been happening for years already. Not to mention the revelation that there is a guy in New York City receiving tomorrow's newspaper, what is to say that not more people in other cities all around the world do not receive tomorrow's newspaper? Suddenly, Gary might not be so alone. Twenty years later, Gary can start a Discord server with only people who receive tomorrow's newspaper today, so that everyone can at least talk to each other about the stressful life of being the recipient of tomorrow's newspaper.
It is a bit of a shame that this episode did not dive fully into the idea of Gry being the only person of morale to receive the paper. Sam Cooper was clearly corrupted in some sense – sure, he may have hired people to save lives, but he also uses the paper to get rich and make his life more beautiful, begging the question if the New York paper decided to send Sam to Chicago to get "reformed" as a recipient of tomorrow's newspaper, to be more worthy of it, and to maybe get his relationship with his daughter fixed. Maybe Sam showed up in Chicago because the paper knew that Gary would "fix" him, as Gary is the only true and honest person working for the Powers That Be who not only is deserving of the paper, but could also help out his "colleagues" every once in a while. Yes, the episode should have gone straight into that, but in the end, it was almost always about Sam's get-rich-quick scheme and his trouble with his daughter.
 |
| Gary celebrates his third anniversary of putting out fires by putting out a fire. |
By the way, did Sam ever get special treatment from the paper? That is also something this episode missed getting into: Gary and Sam having a conversation over a bottle of beer about their exploits with the paper, beginning with Lucius Snow, or simply just that one time Gary woke up in the 1800s to try and prevent a city-wide fire from breaking out. Did that ever happen to Sam? Did Sam ever deal with the assassination attempt on the president? That being said, what was Sam doing when he got the New York Daily News with the assassination of the president on the front page two and a half years ago? And yes, the most important question remains: Did Lucius Snow ever meet another
recipient of the paper, now that we know there is more than one person who receives a copy? Is it just an American thing,
or does that happen worldwide? Are there any women among the recipients? So many
questions I am asking myself, all after an episode that never even took its premise fully seriously.
Obviously, Sam was a bit of an asshole character, but I guess that is what happens when you beat the stress and chaos of receiving the paper by getting filthy rich, and would not want to deal with the stress of running around town and being the good Samaritan. In that case, I do have to give Sam props, because having to "run" an entire city with more than ten million inhabitants and five boroughs is hard to do, especially in that traffic – delegating that work seems to be appropriate, since more people in a city also means more accidents. The second and third seasons had Gary in quite a funk sometimes, and sometimes there was a sense of the paper burning him out. Maybe Sam went through the same emotions once, which is when he decided to hire a crew, meaning that Sam is now where Gary will be three years from now. Still, the episode did not go into that part of the premise because it was focused on Sam and his daughter instead.
The story of Willie seemed okay, even if it just worked as a connecting piece between Gary and Sam's stories. Willie was getting into accidents because the world seems to hate him, and getting the desire to kill himself because nothing was working out for him that day. Suicide is usually a pretty serious topic, even for EARLY EDITION, but for this episode, the writers chose to use a somewhat comedic and absurd character to carry a point home about how important it is to have and love your children. We will never know what Willie really wanted because that was not what the writers wanted to tell us in this episode. It was just a story about a guy from New York and about his estranged daughter. That makes Willis a plot device in Sam's story, making this entire thing a bit weirder.
 |
| There is one too many newspaper subscriptions being delivered to this address. |
With the idea of Gary not being the only one receiving tomorrow's newspaper, one can only hope that the writers were planning to re-use that premise for later episodes. Who knows, maybe a team-up to prevent something a much larger and more dangerous disaster would be a nifty idea, but I can assume that EARLY EDITION was not going into that for season four. The ratings have been down, the slight retool it executed at the beginning of the third season by making the cast younger and convincing younger audiences to watch the show has failed, and that usually means the network was not as interested anymore to pay the big bucks for the Saturday night family-friendly TV drama. I do not think there was any money in the budget for a team-up episode, and I do feel that this season of EARLY EDITION will look a bit cheaper because of the fact that it could not attract new viewers in the previous year. But who knows, maybe I am wrong.
