I don't know how many of yall may have watched Terriers when it was on FX last fall. It never found an audience and didn't get a second season. For those of us that did see it, it was like what I imagine it was like for those few that saw Firefly during its brief broadcast run, just baffling that no one else seemed to be watching one of the best shows on TV. There is a real chance that Terriers never finds a distributor for it on DVD, which is a damn shame because it is in the same league as Firefly and Freaks and Geeks and ought to become a cult classic on dvd.

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Everyone, all of us, lead these sorts of ordinary lives of bills and just scratching by. It seems so ordinary to us, this everyday living. In the hands of skilled storyteller it becomes compelling, fascinating, heartbreaking.

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Hank Dolworth and Britt Pollack are richly, dangerously real and beautiful in a paper bag-filled-with-the-shards-of-a-broken-stained-glass-window sort of way. They’re gorgeous and tragic in a way that everyone’s lives are gorgeous and tragic. They’re scraping by, paycheck-to-paycheck, with their shitty private investigator license anyone with a few bucks and the ability to pass a multiple-choice test can get. You can picture them standing in line at DMVs, or hauling four weeks of laundry to the fluff’n’fold, all while patting their soft bellies and swearing that they will start going to gym just as soon as they can find a spare hour in the day.

Hank and Britt speak to each other in that simple but eloquent shorthand that men use with the friends they love. A tiny line, tossed casually across the bench seat in an old pickup truck is as good as three hours on a therapist’s couch. It’s a rare glimpse into the friendships of men, we don’t often get to witness outside of films where everyone is dying on a battlefield. Hank and Britt aren’t mortally wounded in a swamp, uttering dying declarations of “I LOVE YOU MAN,” but they love and support each other all the same, without the rifles and the jungle rot.

Everything about them is just so heartachingly human. I don’t want to make excuses for, or gloss over the shitty things they do. I just root for them to be okay, and make amends for their mistakes. I can’t dislike them, even when they pull violent, underhanded, creepy scumbaggery moves in pathetic efforts to soothe something as innocuous as a bruised ego.

Terriers on DVD