It's amazing how much my relationship with television has changed over the years.

I was never a big TV viewer when I was young. While I ultimately became a big fan of "Star Trek," I never watched even one episode during the years it was shown on ABC. The first show that ever became "appointment" television for me was "Dallas," which came on in 1978. It was around that same time that I first got HBO, and for most of the next decade I watched a lot more movies on cable than I did regular shows with all their commercials.

I still had a few shows that were appointment TV for me -- "Dynasty," "Moonlighting" and, starting in 1986,<a title="LA Law" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Law"> "LA Law."</a>

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DouX9Ubw-Xw" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315"></iframe>

I don't know if there was ever a show that had a cooler theme song/credits sequence. Starting with the jazz saxophone riff, and then the sound of the trunk slamming shut and showing the California vanity license plate reading "LA LAW."

That image totally resonated with me. I was born in California, and even though I had never lived there, I had visited the state with my first wife in 1978 and then by myself earlier in 1986. My goal from the time I had started my career was someday to make it to the West Coast, and "LA Law" was so totally '80s California that almost every time I watched it, it reinforced my desire someday to live there.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/220px-LA_Law.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-1687" title="220px-LA_Law" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/220px-LA_Law.jpg" alt="" width="220" height="163" /></a>Two months after the show came on the air, I moved to Colorado.  Two years later I moved on to Nevada, still watching "LA Law" every Thursday night at 10 p.m. (it had been 9 p.m. in St. Louis and in Colorado) The show lasted until May 1994, by which time I had lived in Los Angeles for four years. I had stopped watching by then. Most television dramas start getting weird after five or six years, and I was working a lot of nights by then anyway.

Appointment television was becoming a lot less important to me by then. In the last 20 years, I only had one show that mattered to me that much, and after four or five seasons, even "The West Wing" wasn't worth making the effort.

Of course, the advent of DVDs changed all that. All of a sudden, I could buy an entire year's worth of a show and watch it as quickly -- or as slowly -- as I wanted, and I didn't have to sit through commercials. There were numerous shows I hadn't watched that became favorites on DVD -- "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel," "Boston Legal" and others.

But "LA Law" never seemed to come out on DVD. The earlier hit show by creator Steven Bochco -- "Hill Street Blues" -- hadn't done all that well, and to date only two seasons have made it to DVD.

Now season one of "LA Law" is out, although technically I don't think it has been released in this country. The box that came from Amazon says it's a Region 2 (Europe) DVD, although it plays just fine on my Blu-Ray player. The schedule for release in the United Kingdom is for a season to come out every three months, so who knows?

I do know that at the beginning of every episode, hearing the sax riff and the slamming trunk and then seeing the license plate takes me back in a way no other shows do. For a minute, it's 1986 again. I'm 36 years old and still working my way toward making my dreams come true.

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