If you’ve been following Downton Abbey and anxiously anticipating season three, this post is for you! The show’s producers have struck a deal for ‘season pass’ buyers—customers who purchase all of season three in advance—that will allow pass holders to view the final three episodes before they’re shown on TV.
From Slate:
[Amazon Instant Video] will make the final three episodes of Season 3 available to purchasers of a Downton Abbey season pass on Jan. 29, which means subscribers will be able to watch Episodes 5, 6, and 7 before TV viewers. (Episode 7, which was the show’s Christmas special in the United Kingdom, will air on PBS nearly three weeks later, on Feb. 17.)
Amazon confirms this on its site:
Buy a TV Pass for “Downton Abbey: Season 3” and you will instantly receive all remaining episodes in the season on January 29th, almost three weeks prior to their broadcast on TV.
Downton Abbey, Season 3 (5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99 per episode to buy, $13.23 to buy all seven episodes in the season)
If you’ve never seen the program, here’s a summary from IMDB:
Lord Crawley sees his family heritage, especially the grand country home Downton Abbey, as his mission in life. The death of his heir aboard the Titanic means distant cousin Matthew Crawley, a Manchester lawyer, suddenly is next in line and accepts moving onto the vast estate with his even more modernist, socially engaged mother, who clashes with his lordship’s domineering, conservative ma the dowager. Marrying off the daughters is another concern. Meanwile the butler presides over a staff which serves the family but also lead most of their entire lives in the servants quarters, intriguing amongst themselves. – Written by KGF Vissers
Season One (4.75/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99 per episode to buy and $9.99 to buy all seven episodes in the season) and Season Two (5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99 per episode to buy and $14.99 to buy all nine episodes in the season) of Downton Abbey are also available in Amazon’s Instant Video Store.
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It’s been all over the news: Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o’s recently deceased girlfriend never existed at all. Whether Te’o was complicit in it, or merely a victim, this was a “Catfish” scam.
The term comes from a documentary film that exposes the scam, and if you’d like to learn more about it, that film is available in Amazon’s Instant Video Store:
Catfish (PG-13, 3.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99 to rent and $9.99 to buy)
From Slate:
The story begins when Nev, a photographer based in New York, strikes up a Facebook correspondence with an 8-year-old girl in Michigan who sends him a painting based on one of his photos. Curious about this precocious girl and her family, Nev “friends” Abby, acting as a kind of artistic mentor and encouraging her to make more work. In the process, he also becomes Facebook friends with Abby’s mother, Angela, and her 19-year-old half-sister, Megan, a dancer, singer and aspiring model…
Eight months and many Facebook postings, phone conversations, and Gchats later, Nev has become deeply embroiled with this creative family and their network of online friends, and he and Megan are beginning to fall for each other with the hothouse intensity only social media can enable. On a trip to Vail to film a dance festival, Nev, Rel and Henry make a troubling discovery about Megan…
It’s when the boys get to Michigan that the movie goes from being a clumsily constructed video diary to a fascinating exploration of the deceptions—of self and others—made possible by the Internet. As they untangle the Facebook world from the real one, their quest to expose the truth about Megan and her family instead forces them to expose uncomfortable truths about themselves.