I didn’t watch much television growing up. I engaged in a lot of extracurricular activities and I loved to read. My favourite television show – when I wrote in my friends’ profile books¹ since everyone seemed to include that after favourite colour, favourite food, favourite drink, favourite band, favourite singer – was written as “The Simpsons, Madeline, Rugrats, Do Over”.

What the heck is Do Over, you might ask? Given that my other three favourites are well-known and pretty typical, it didn’t seem like much of a cool unique favourite.

Do Over was a comedy/drama/fantasy television series that got axed after about fifteen or sixteen episodes. Was it really that bad, though?

I had seen the trailer for it on television and it immediately made me want to watch. It was about a 34-year-old man, who, after an accident, is sent back into the past and finds himself as a teenager in high school. Now, I don’t really know Penn Badgley, but apparently he was fifteen at the time he played main character Joel, and everyone laughs at his time/experience with Do Over. The series aired in 2002. I was only about eleven years old at the time.

I loved this concept of time travel being used in a television show, and the comedy really pulled me in, and it sounded very Back to the Future-like. And BTTF is my favourite movie.

I would come back from ballet class on Thursday and rush home, ready to watch Do Over. At some point, I think either the television show or my ballet class moved times, so I would sit and watch the episode even though I would be in a mad rush to go to ballet.

It was only a 24-minute show within a half hour slot, but I wanted to watch it more than anything. The Simpsons was always playing repeats, I had probably seen every Madeline episode, and Rugrats wasn’t at the top of my list. I only cared enough for Do Over.

It then moved to Wednesday nights, and I was thrilled because growing up, I didn’t have extracurricular activities on Wednesday nights and I enjoyed being free. I would finish my homework and run to the television for dinner and watch, or after dinner I would patiently wait in front of the television and hope no one else would hog it. One time, I remember missing the first few minutes of an episode and being extremely irritated, wondering what I had missed.

One day, it wasn’t aired.

The next week, it wasn’t either.

Apparently, it had been cancelled, and I don’t think I even got to see all the episodes. There had been a big fanbase, but ratings were low. To hell with ratings.

It was a very short-lived. I can’t even find a picture of the television show that isn’t pixelated or larger than three hundred pixels.

I don’t know why I liked the show so much and felt so devastated when I missed it. To this day, I still don’t really watch much television; I generally hate television. But I will always remember Do Over as one of those quaint little shows that I liked for some time, that disappeared into the ether.