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ARCHIVE DVDs NOT AVAILABLE IN STORES by Diane Werts You know how it is. The more there is to watch on TV -- the more channels, the more shows -- the harder it gets to find the little that's actually worth watching. But that problem is magnified on DVD. Either you can't find the quality shows worth buying, or those gems have such an "exclusive" (read: small) audience that they don't even get released on disc. What's a discerning viewer to do? Turn to the internet. That's where we here at TV Worth Watching try to point you toward the best viewing on TV and, increasingly, online. The web is also where more and more DVD distributors are selling obscure goodies and collectors' items direct to consumers, bypassing the retail middleman. That enables the studios to finally make their less commercially viable titles available to the connoisseurs chomping at the bit to to buy them. Online is where you'll find not-in-stores DVD releases of classics like the pioneering '40s sitcom The Goldbergs and 1983's prescient hostage-coverage TV movie "news report" Special Bulletin. Recent series, too -- Rufus Sewell's Eleventh Hour and Dylan McDermott's Dark Blue. You'll find subsequent seasons of shows discontinued in stores, along with vintage TV movies and miniseries you thought you'd never see again. Direct-to-consumer titles also range into Christmas specials, cartoons, and the old-time movies you've seen on Turner Classic Movies -- even the short subjects that often seem more delightful than the feature films they fill time between. Below you'll find a rundown of the distributors now selling direct online. We hope you'll choose the convenient option to click on our links to buy. Then TV Worth Watching will share in a tiny slice of the revenue, to help us pay our bills and keep news like this coming your way.
WARNER ARCHIVE Warner Archive is an online pioneer that now offers more than 500 titles direct to consumers. This venerable studio's TV output encompasses everything from last season's TNT drama Dark Blue to the '80s miniseries Lace (with its then-shocking, now-camp key line "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"). And Warner's unparallelled movie archive (also encompassing golden-age MGM product) reaches all the way back to Hollywood silents starring Greta Garbo. The Archive discs are manufactured on demand, which means when you order, the studio burns a disc especially for you, onto the DVD-R discs used in home recorders (the ones with the purple recording surface). These MOD discs don't always play well with home recorders or computer drives, but mine have always worked on standard DVD/BD players. Most titles cost $15-$20 (via DVD and/or Windows Media download; sorry, no Mac), with some multi-disc sets costing more. But Archive goodies frequently go on sale. I've viewed a half-dozen Warner Archive releases, and the quality is good. Source materials are generally not remastered for DVD, but the film prints are usually clean and, in some cases, indistinguishable from similar retail releases. (Warner's web site offers video excerpts to preview the video quality.) Though few special features are offered, the Archive titles have regular DVD menus and case packaging. TV titles rescued for release by Warner Archive include Gene Roddenberry's two unsold post-Star Trek TV pilots Genesis II and Planet Earth. Also available are TV movie pilots you never thought you'd see again -- the Vietnam-era "find myself" motorcycle odyssey of Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson, the '60s Medical Center starter Operation Heartbeat with Chad Everett, and Patrick Duffy's 1977 pre-Dallas amphibean adventures in The Man From Atlantis. Special Bulletin is a must-see -- the 1983 Emmy magnet with its stunning "breaking news" video recreation of a terrorist hostage situation, starring Ed Flanders (St. Elsewhere), David Clennon (thirtysomething) and David Rasche (Sledge Hammer). This searing original was made by the team soon to create thirtysomething, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, whose portrait of TV news isn't pretty but sure is sharp, right down to the "event" logos and catchphrases that package horrifying news like some tiltillating melodrama. (Special Bulletin is also available from Amazon.com, as are some other Warner Archive titles, generally at a higher price than direct purchase.) Other vintage TV goodies showcase Jamie Lee Curtis in the 1981 docudrama Death of a Centerfold, Ann-Margret in the 1987 Dominick Dunne murder hit The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and Gene Rowlands as the troubled First Lady of 1987's The Betty Ford Story. Or get more recent with Sewell's short-lived CBS suspenser Eleventh Hour and the first run of McDermott's TNT copfest Dark Blue, which starts its second cable season Aug. 4. TCM addicts will love Warner Archive's range of movie releases. Silent films unavailable in stores include Garbo's Love and The Temptress, Norma Shearer's Lady of the Night, John Barrymore's Beau Brummel, and Marion Davies' The Patsy. There's also the early talkie all-star showcase Hollywood Revue of 1929, capturing the fascinating growing pains of an industry morphing almost overnight from artsy pantomime to spell-it-out dialogue. Showbiz portraying showbiz is all over Warner Archive -- Will Rogers Jr. inhabits his folksy father in 1952's The Story of Will Rogers, Danny Thomas remakes Al Jolson in 1953's The Jazz Singer, and late-in-life Errol Flynn plays John Barrymore in 1958's lurid Hollywood biopic Too Much, Too Soon. There's also Chevy Chase riding herd on Munchkins in 1981's Under the Rainbow. Other offerings range all the way into the 1990s, and you can use filters on the Warner Archive site to search by decade (or genre) to make browsing easier. More recent titles include Johnny Depp's weird 1994 sleeper Arizona Dream, 1989's Penn & Teller Get Killed, Timothy Hutton with then-wife Debra Winger in 1987's moody romance Made in Heaven, and 1980's comedy performance film Gilda Live. Even more creative -- and more essential -- Warner Archive is packaging hard-to-find short subjects, which offer different windows on the worlds of both vintage Hollywood and mid-century America. TCM fans will recognize the channel's between-films fillers in the 6-disc Big Band, Jazz & Swing set of more than 60 shorts, featuring the likes of Cab Calloway, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, even erstwhile bandleaders Ozzie Nelson and Desi Arnaz (for just $50!).
SHOUT SELECT Shout Factory has long been the tubehead's best friend in the DVD biz. The pop culture lovers there specialize in preserving touchstones like Freaks and Geeks, Ozzie & Harriet, Peyton Place, SCTV, It's Garry Shandling's Show and thirtysomething in fun-packed sets that fans love finding on store shelves. Now Shout is offering some shows online-only, especially those perceived to be less commercially viable and more collector-oriented. But Shout goes the full mile with these Shout Direct releases, producing smart booklets that explain historical context, plus as many on-disc extras as they can. In The Goldbergs , writer-producer-star Gertrude Berg virtually invents the TV sitcom, based on her longrunning radio show, and the extras explain that process as well as the social context of its urban immigrant Jewish perspective. Subsequent seasons of shows that might otherwise remain stalled for distribution also make Shout Direct a wonderful resource. Here's the place to continue collecting not-in-stores seasons of Room 222, Ironside, My Two Dads, Small Wonder and the unsung 1969 teachercom The Bill Cosby Show, an early single-camera half-hour that never gets enough credit for its easygoing innovation. Shout Direct also offers children's content and animation like Bump in the Night and C.O.P.S. Shout is putting a twist on its own factory store releases by partnering exclusively with Amazon.com on the fourth and final season of thirtysomething, due out Sept. 7.
MGM LIMITED EDITION COLLECTION MGM's Limited Edition Collection is based at Amazon.com. While the studio's earlier output (1920s-1950s) is owned by Turner/Warner, later movies and TV shows not sold in stores are available to order online as manufactured-on-demand sets. TV DVD sets from MGM include Luke Perry's Jeremiah Season 2 and Poltergeist: The Legacy Season 2, plus both versions of Flipper (the '60s original Season 2 and The New Adventures Season 1). Preorders are open for Broderick Crawford's no-nonsense '50s fave Highway Patrol. Among MGM's feature titles are Dick Van Dyke big-screen vehicles Cold Turkey and Fitzwilly, the Henry Fonda political drama The Best Man, Rudolf Nureyev's Valentino, and the underappreciated '70s alternative newspaper tale Between the Lines, stuffed to the gills with stars-to-be (John Heard, Jeff Goldblum, Lindsay Crouse, Stephen Collins, Bruno Kirby and more). BUY FROM MGM LIMITED EDITION COLLECTION
MTV/VIACOM Viacom-owned cable channels like MTV and Nickelodeon have also been unearthing treats to manufacture on demand via Amazon. Nick's kid-aimed MOD discs include season sets of Rugrats, Doug and Hey Arnold! Fans of MTV's trashtastic Jersey Shore have been able to buy the uncensored Season 1 on Amazon exclusively since February, though it won't hit regular release till July 20. Other titles from MTV channels (including siblings like LOGO) include The Head, The Maxx, Coming Out Stories, Shirts & Skins, College Life, and 16 & Pregnant.
UNIVERSAL VAULT Universal has partnered with Amazon and Turner Classic Movies' Vault Collection to make available releases not sold in stores. Amazon is where you'll find Jack Webb's 1954 Dragnet movie and 1964's The Brass Bottle with Barbara Eden, which turned into her TV series I Dream of Jeannie (where Larry Hagman replaced the original film's Tony Randall). Universal movie exclusives from Amazon include Ann-Margret's '60s campfest Kitten With a Whip, Lily Tomlin's The Incredible Shrinking Woman, and further back, Charles Laughton's '30s delight Ruggles of Red Gap. BUY FROM AMAZON'S UNIVERSAL VAULT Turner Classic Movies' web site offers its own Universal Vault titles. Collections spotlight teen musical queen Deanna Durbin and the early work of Cary Grant, plus cult horror treats like 1933's Murders in the Zoo and long-lost gems like Barbara Stanwyck's Christmas story Remember the Night. TCM Vault offerings include extras like intros by TCM host Robert Osborne, original publicity materials, and more. BUY FROM TCM'S UNIVERSAL VAULT
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PARTY DOWN Season 1 Starz DVD, $30 ($22 Amazon) by Diane Werts It's always great to see a show that manages to reboot itself each week while remaining true to its worthy self. Barney Miller and Night Court are two of my favorite sitcoms, thanks to a diverse and deep cast of regulars and a revealing environment that weekly hands them a new parade of guest stars to bounce off of. Party Down from Starz now rounds out my holy trinity of smart comedies that just keep refreshing themselves. This low-budget gem from Starz -- not exactly the channel you expect to hit a sitcom out of the park -- updates the demeanor of those '80s hits for a new generation that's seen it all and arrives with a healthy dose of cynicism. And hope. That's the neat balance of Party Down (Starz' second season starts April 23), with its sextet of cater-waiters idling on the edge of a Hollywood break that may or may not ever come. Or maybe arrived and departed already. The show's single-camera awkward moments start with the overeager catering team lead (Ken Marino, Reaper), who's given up his own hard partying ways, only to replace them with zealous taskmastering and giddy food franchise goals. Back with him is his former bartender (Adam Scott, Tell Me You Love Me), who actually achieved a measure of fame (well, TV commercial familiarity), then bounced back to purposeless slackerville. The bartender is hot for a confused comedian (Lizzy Caplan, Freaks and Geeks), who may or may not stay married to somebody else. Also confused, though he thinks he's not, is a dim blond actor-model-rocker (Ryan Hansen, Veronica Mars) who's mostly "in the overall handsome business." Not dim, but mopily derisive, is the socially clueless sci-fi screenwriter (Martin Starr, Freaks and Geeks). And since there's always a wily veteran, Jane Lynch is a been-there actress given to counseling the wannabes with movie set war stories, when she's not acting gleefully (teehee) inappropriately. (Or being subbed in the season's last two of 10 episodes by an equally out-there Jennifer Coolidge.) Throw them together, then throw them into screwy situations -- homeowners association parties, young Republican meetings, gay weddings, a porn awards show, even a sweet sixteen party aboard the Queen Mary. As the producers say in short promotional making-of interviews, "They're people in a place that they don't want to be in, and they're forced to be together while they wait to get someplace better." Unlike the steady title cop in Barney Miller or wacky Judge Harry in Night Court, the Party Down regulars don't solve other people's problems, and often exacerbate their own. But they're got a sort of relaxed rhythm and funky warmth that sneaks up on you. Party Down ambles along with them and the people whose paths they cross, without much aiming at a climax. It's a sharply edited slice of life enlivened by the guests who wander through -- Enrico Colantoni as a naked party host, Kristen Bell as a driven competing caterer, Marilu Henner as a motivational guru, J.K. Simmons as a bombastic movie producer and sweet sixteen dad, George Takei as himself (who else?). Season 2 starts on Starz April 23 at 10 p.m. ET with a cast change, now that Lynch has broken out on Glee. Megan Mullally (Will & Grace) joins the cater crew as a naively nutty divorced mom moved west to get her daughter Escapade into showbiz. Be sure to watch the second season's third episode, when she stumbles through an orgy party trying to snare the problematic wealthy host (Thomas Lennon of Reno 911). It's hysterical, and adult (duh), and slyly observant of human behavior in many, many forms -- mostly by intelligent misfits, frustrated by life, who know better but act badly anyway, sabotaging themselves at every turn. Sound familiar? (Ouch.) Party Down comes from a quartet of creators led by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, who brings along that show's story editor (John Enbom) and supervising producer (Dan Etheridge), plus writer-actor Paul Rudd (currently starring in the big screen's I Love You, Man). They offer a couple of fun and explanatory episode commentaries alongside star-producer Adam Scott. You sure get the feeling they know of what they write. So maybe there's hope yet for the sad sacks of Party Down. |
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BREAKING BAD Season 2 Sony DVD, $40 ($25 Amazon) by Diane Werts Want to know how to write a TV script? Get your mitts on the new Blu-ray release of Breaking Bad: The Complete Second Season. Series creator Vince Gilligan walks you through it in one of the coolest and most informative season-set extras yet. [Extras on the new DVD release are detailed below.] Gilligan offers an interactive look at the scene-breaking, script-writing and visualizing process for last season's stunning finale, which brought the year's 13 episodes full-circle back to the dreamlike teaser that started the season premiere. (Hint: eyeball floating in pool.) Blu-ray's interactive capability is nicely exploited here, as a Gilligan voiceover introduces us to a visual of the writers' room bulletin board, on which each episode is broken down scene by scene on 3-by-5 index cards before the script itself is written. (Now you know why, in this digital age, they still manufacture those cards.) Next you choose which "act" of the episode to dive deeper into. Proceed in-order for the full effect, from the finale episode's own teaser intro to Act IV's eerie last image. Click on a card within an act, and a text explanation pops up to explain more about the brainstorming of that particular story "beat" and how it fits into the whole. These texts could have been toss-offs. But they're revelations. Who knew that Jonathan Banks (Ken Wahl's straight-arrow boss on Wiseguy) made his towering series entrance in this late episode as a criminal "fixer" only because sleaze lawyer portrayer Bob Odenkirk was unavailable for shooting? (They say there are no accidents.) The explanations also ponder the impact of specific moments of action/performance, the steps of deciding when and how to reveal crucial information, the thinking behind character motivations, and even the influences behind the moods and reactions the writers wanted to evoke. Then click again to read the actual script page on which it's fleshed out in both dialogue and stage direction. Another click plays the completed scene as filmed and edited. (The Sony distribution folks manage to intrude with copyright notices after every bloomin' scene -- but it's a small price to pay to get this deep into the process.) While the DVD version doesn't have this Blu-ray-exclusive interactive Writers' Lab, it includes all of Breaking Bad: Complete Second Season's other voluminous extras: -- Season 1 recap As if Breaking Bad's episodes from Season 2 weren't impressive enough in themselves. They look gorgeous on either DVD or (especially in high-def) Blu-ray, shot on unique New Mexico locations with a cinematic eye for angles, and they sound staggering, too. Gilligan's crew has a keen ear for atmosphere. On top of that laconic theme signature (amazing, how shows like Breaking Bad, Lost and The Shield now set their tone in a few seconds of musical shriek or drawl), the audio slithers through an array of uncanny sounds that edge from ambient reality into ethereal delirium. Which is what I must be in, having failed to even briefly recount the show's plot, characters, actors or anything else that critics are supposed to explain for the uninitiated. If that's you, just go to AMC's Breaking Bad site for all the details. And then head back to TV by the time AMC starts the third season on Sunday, March 21 at 10 p.m. ET. I've watched its first three episodes, and they're killer. Once you've seen Seasons 1 and 2 -- Bryan Cranston didn't win two Emmys for nothing -- you'd expect no less. (By the way, Season 1 finally hits Blu-ray on March 16, too.) |
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ELVIS (1979) Shout! Factory by Diane Werts People went a little crazy when rock 'n' roll living legend Elvis Presley died unexpectedly on Aug. 16, 1977 at the age of 42. Elvismaniacs went into shock and hysteria, extolling their idol into some kind of god-like icon. Elvis skeptics hit back, mocking his cheesy Vegas jumpsuits, cookie-cutter '60s flicks, prosaic post-Army music output, and wasted potential. There wasn't much middle ground -- until John Carpenter's Elvis miniseries hit ABC on Feb. 11, 1979. Nobody expected much. The 31-year-old director was coming off a low-budget frightfest called Halloween. The star had been a child actor known for Disney drivel like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. But Kurt Russell turned around his own image by turning the iconic/insipid emblem into a full-bodied human being. A loving son. A loyal friend. A restless rebel. A soul full of faith and talent and rage and heartache. Which isn't to say that Carpenter's Elvis is a brilliant piece of filmmaking awaiting rediscovery as some kind of backbeat Citizen Kane. But it was crucial at the time, allowing a polarized public to reassess Elvis not as a totemic celebrity but as an accessibly vulnerable person. That approach is illuminated in the new Shout DVD's sole featurette -- a vintage making-of promotional short ("Bringing a Legend to Life") where then-shaggy Carpenter chats from behind his aviator shades about his view of Elvis' rise to stardom. While it would be nice to have a current-day commentary with reflections from Carpenter and Russell, at least Shout provides one from Elvis soundalike Ronnie McDowell, who voiced the movie's songs, and Edie Hand, an Elvis cousin who wrote the book The Genuine Elvis and here recalls the Elvis she knew as a youth. And youth is indeed Carpenter's focus for his two-parter's 168 minutes, tracking Elvis from a childhood of lost-twin loneliness to the teen development of his musical personality through his meteoric '50s fame into his joys and traumas of the '60s. The action leaves off with Elvis' 1969 Vegas return to live performing, after which, of course, came the decline into the drugs that killed him and the jumpsuit self-parody that overshadowed his rock 'n' roll bonafides. In that sense, Carpenter's Elvis is very much a product of its time -- a laundry-list TV biopic focused on the glory days, episodically constructed around commercial breaks, and delivered more as soap opera than incisive portrait. Shelley Winters plays Presley's beloved mother, Gladys, which tells you all you need to know about the movie's tonal temperature. (Winters, once a fine actress, was best known by then for both eating and swimming through the scenery of Irwin Allen's preposterous glossy disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure.) But then there's Russell, who knew he'd been given a huge break here and made the most of it. He gets inside Elvis where the movie doesn't, embodying his itchy energy, earthy magnetism, trademark speech rhythms, and even that famous smile/sneer. (He's not a bad lip-syncher, either.) Russell immediately vaulted himself from TV guest spots to movie stardom, in the next five years proving himself a big-screen presence in drama (Silkwood, Swing Shift), comedy (Used Cars) and action, reunited with Carpenter for the muscular thrills of Escape From New York and The Thing. But viewers who saw Russell's Elvis often remember him better for that than for anything else. Oddly enough, Russell in his child-star days had worked with Presley in his MGM programmer days, when Russell was 12 and Presley was 28, in 1963's It Happened at the World's Fair. (His IMDb credit reads Boy Who Kicks Mike, meaning Elvis.) And he'd be back in the Elvis business with 2001's 3000 Miles to Graceland, as one of the heist guys who strike Vegas during an Elvis impersonators convention. Clearly, the connection was/is there. And so Elvis conveys the kind of visceral impact that can't be planned or produced. It just happens. Thirty years later, people still get a little extreme over Elvis. This DVD helps bring us all back down to earth. |
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LOST: SEASON 5 Disney by Diane Werts As if you couldn't get lost enough in Lost, here comes Lost University. It's an interactive BD Live Blu-ray bonus feature that makes you a student of the show, complete with classes detailing the plot's ins-and-outs, homework to back it up, and exams to test exactly how much you've absorbed. Get your student ID, and get going. Unless you're me, in which case you're not knowledgeable enough to matriculate right away. The first step to this web-connected goodie (requiring a Blu-ray player live-connected to the internet) is a 23-question multiple-choice test for admission. I got only 10 of the 23 text queries correct -- I'm just not that attuned to the distinctions between Dharma's Orchid and the Swan stations -- so I had to take Lost 101 (aka watching a 10-minute summary clipfest) before the computer at the other end of the BD Live connection would give me a student number and ID card to print out. Once you're in, you get screens of personalized emails reminding you what you've signed up for. You can access student records to see how many credits you've racked up. But first, of course, you peruse the course catalog to choose classes in Lost-connected subject matter -- history, philosophy, physics, and more. (You can't get to art and other second-semester classes till you've earned nine credits, which is essentially passing three classes.) Lost University's immersive interface even posts campus "wall" notices while BD Live is loading info from the web. (Good to know when anti-radiation pills will be available.) The graphics are sharply detailed, and the response time over a broadband internet connection is pretty good. It's an entertaining way to while away time while awaiting ABC's start of Lost's sixth and final season Feb. 2. But when they call this a school, they mean it. My class Science 101: Jungle Survival Skills consisted of 11 minutes of cast members "lecturing" (basically chatting backstage to the camera) on the importance of shelter, ways to make fire, finding food and other necessities of castaway life. But class is followed by a text screen saying you've got homework -- which involves rounding up drinking straws, toothpicks and twine to build a raft, which serves as your exam. Uhh . . . sorry. Not that dedicated, guys. And I had signed up for Survival because it required just one class. Most of the others -- like Philosophy: I'm Lost Therefore I Am, or Physics: Introductory Physics of Time Travel -- are two classes each, "taught" by three outside-expert PhD.s who I'm sure know whereof they speak. I'm just not sure I care to know, too. Lost University should be catnip to those who gorge on the series' every last mythology detail -- but I'm more a fan of its character study myself. Which means I'm amused by, but not over-the-moon about, all the collectible goodies in the Lost Season 5 Dharma Initiative Orientation Kit. This higher-priced limited edition set comes in a huge corrugated box containing a white binder that tries to be another immersive experience. It's as if you've stepped onto the island as a '70s Dharma recruit (a la "LaFleur") and been handed your working materials -- job manual, site map, cafeteria menu, even Dharma's VHS welcome videotape (floating around the internet, in case you're interested), plus uniform patches, a Geronimo Jackson "45rpm single" (on CD, of course), and finally, the same 5 video discs (either DVD or BD) contained in the standard set. Only here, they slide out of floppy disc envelopes. Nice touch. But worth the extra dollars? Maybe, if you're a hardcore mythology fan. Or hardcore greedy -- customer reviews on the web seem to indicate many buyers are socking these sets away unplayed-with, desperate to preserve their future collectible value. (So much for true devotion.) There are extras aplenty on the Lost Season 5 standard sets, too, both Blu-ray and DVD, that don't require passing tests. Featurettes include a tour of the L.A.-based writers offices, so you can put faces to those names; making-of footage of action sequences; a day with Nestor Carbonell (Richard Alpert); and an explanation of the season's leaps in time between the 1970s and 2000s. Perhaps the coolest bonus is a half-hour '70s "ABC documentary" called Mysteries of the Universe: The Dharma Initiative, which does a pretty good job of being both vintage quaint and mythology goofy. Here are your Lost Season 5 purchase options (prices are list/Amazon as of Dec. 14): Lost: Season 5 DVD Dharma Kit: $120/$78 |
THE AMOS 'N ANDY SHOW 8 discs each (16 total) by Diane Werts Unauthorized TV DVD releases are a bad thing. They're often low quality. The sellers can be dodgy. They violate the legal rights of those who own the show. And they discourage official releases by diverting revenue into the hands of pirates. Now here's why I'm making an exception for The Nostalgia Merchant's two-set release of Amos 'n' Andy. The transfers from the sitcom's vintage film prints aren't bad. This particular video distributor has a 30-year track record. And it's that rare case where the show's ownership simply can't release an authorized version. There's just too much lingering controversy over this 1950s hit -- TV's first major network series with a black cast -- for rights-owning corporation CBS to go there. The Amos 'n Andy Show was pulled off the network in 1953 after two seasons thanks to protests by the NAACP and other anti-bias groups, and CBS has refused to publicly present the sitcom for more than four decades now (after halting syndication in the 1960s). Despite its popularity -- or because of it -- Amos 'n Andy has remained a lightning rod in its half-century of electronic exile. The tragedy behind this: A simple TV sitcom has been demonized into something so evil it must be kept from public view; and two or three subsequent generations of viewers who've never seen the show have no way of understanding the show's historical impact on American television or American culture. These DVD sets rectify that by presenting 72 CBS TV episodes in the hapless daily lives of earnest cabdriver Amos (Alvin Childress, later seen in '70s sitcoms like The Jeffersons), his buffoon pal Andy (Spencer Williams Jr., also a respected film producer-director), and their scamming Harlem lodge brother Kingfish (Tim Moore, a key figure in black vaudeville). The plots constructed by white writers are basic -- Kingfish scheming to make money, Andy obliviously being taken advantage of, and Amos fading into the background as a level-headed person who's entirely too normal (read: boring) to figure into the plots' shenanigans. It's simple comedy. Which is often simply funny. In the 1950s, however, this was TV's preeminent depiction of black characters -- sometimes its only depiction -- amid the raging civil rights movement, Southern segregation-by-law, and a kind of pervasive discrimination that today's younger generations can barely imagine. Black buffoons and schemers were not the portrayals that equality activists wanted to see showcased when there were no sensibly realistic black lead characters anywhere on television to balance Amos 'n Andy's burlesque-style bumblings. While it's far too naive to say we are "past" this problem (as some of the show's come-lately "supporters" claim), it's also too easy to simply insist the series not be seen. It is finally time to start comprehending what Amos 'n Andy meant then, what it means now, and why that impact gives it importance in our culture. This is even more true when you learn about the characters' evolution in the highly recommended book The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. Melvin Patrick Ely's detailed history explores the pair's 1920s radio roots as a (relatively) sensitive portrait of the great Negro migration from South to North, through two vivid characters who quickly became beloved to audiences both white and black -- despite being written and voiced by white creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (later supplanted on TV by black actors). It's also time to appreciate the work done by the cast of the much-broader TV show, under tricky conditions, to deliver comedy that often holds up today in its elemental way. This argument has also been made by black performers trying to reclaim this piece of cultural history, most notably in 1983's show-the-show-already documentary Amos 'n Andy: Anatomy of a Controversy. Seen on public TV stations, the hour had comedian George Kirby appreciatively hosting vintage clips, new cast interviews, and in-context comments from admirers like Marla Gibbs and Redd Foxx. Context is what's key here, and the Nostalgia Merchant DVD sets help deliver that. In addition to the TV episodes, the second set includes RKO's creaky 1930 feature film Check and Double Check, in which radio voices Gosden and Correll don blackface to visibly portray their creations. Uncomfortable? You bet. Which is why it's worth watching, and absorbing, as a visceral window into a bygone era and a way of thinking that's now hard to imagine. Ideally, The Amos 'n Andy Show would be coming out in authorized DVD sets from CBS, remastered from the original elements, rather than duped elsewhere from the sometimes scratchy film prints seen here. (All in all, these are better than most third-party transfers.) Ideally, the rights-owners would make the effort to create bonus features explaining how the characters were introduced in radio, and how their stories evolved from fairly serious serial adventures, presented with social context, into more outlandish and escapist weekly exploits. They'd detail the show's shift from radio to television, from unseen white-voiced leads to TV's black stars. (The radio version did have black supporting actors, many of whom made the jump to TV.) And they'd present a balanced, in-depth study ol the controversy that drove the show off the air and rages still today. That's probably too much to hope for, in an era when almost any subject raises some kind of objection, and when this longtime lightning rod would likely explode in CBS' corporate face. All I can say is that my own multiracial household watches and enjoys these sitcom episodes for what they are -- simplistic burlesques on human foibles and connivings, not designed to make larger statements of any kind. TV Worth Watching proprietor David Bianculli says that when he runs Amos 'n Andy episodes for his college students at Rowan University, telling them only that this is TV's all-time most controversial show, the students are blank-faced as to what the controversy could possibly have entailed. Of course, they've seen Homeboys in Outer Space and Flavor Flav, alongside The Cosby Show and Grey's Anatomy. They're a different generation. We're a different country. And yet, of course, we're not. I have black friends who refuse to even talk about Amos 'n Andy in any way, shape or form -- and they've never seen it. The series still has tremendous power to wound. Isn't it time we take that power away from a 60-year-old sitcom? |
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THE PRISONER Blu-ray by Diane Werts I am a free man! Patrick McGoohan made that declaration immortal back in the '60s, and now AMC is taking another run at his obsessive mind game The Prisoner. (This time, Jim Caviezel is No. 6, with Ian McKellen as game-playing Village leader No. 2). It's an impressively cinematic production. But so, it turns out, was McGoohan's British TV original. That's vividly clear in the new Blu-ray edition, which restores four-decades-old film to a stark and color-saturated luminosity. The terrifyingly placid Village into which McGoohan's ex-spy is kidnaped, imprisoned and provoked to extremes now pops off the screen in high-definition. The effect is almost tactile, whether it's something as intimate as No. 6's cottage, as expansive as those quaint Village environs, or as overwhelming as the Orwellian control room in which the succession of No. 2's confronts The Prisoner. And that big white bubble pursuit weapon called Rover? He practically subsumes us now, too. The immersive Dolby surround mix only amplifies the impact, as does a bounty of extras. A new feature-length documentary called "Don't Knock Yourself Out" takes us back to the series' making with testimony from writers, directors, guest cast members, and more. (Who knew McGoohan was such a ---- ?) Seven episodes have fascinating new commentaries by those who were there. You also get extended episode edits, archive materials, and other vintage memorabilia. (The fifth disc is a DVD, so you can use it in a computer drive to read scripts and more.) A&E houses it all in a compact plastic Blu-ray case that makes the set easy to store and access. While printed material might be nice (the previous DVD set had a wonderful booklet), it feels silly to quibble -- this new Prisoner simply looks and sounds so dazzling. |
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STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES Season 2 - Blu-ray by Diane Werts Is this the "best" season of the '60s original Star Trek series? Always a tricky question. But Season 2 does have Spock in heat, Kirk in a brutal "mirror" universe, societies based on gangsters and Nazis, that kinky episode with the pain collars (babe in foil bikini!), even the visit to Earth featuring Teri Garr.. And the Tribbles. Boy, does it have Tribbles. The furry critters fill an entire disc of the new Season 2 Blu-ray set. (And of the 8-disc remastered DVD set released summer 2008.) Which is not really overkill. The Tribble treatment truly demonstrates how BD can honor Our TV Heritage with smart supplemental content. Here's what you get on the new Blu-ray set's Disc 4: With commentary by scripter David Gerrold. The earlier DVD remastered set has all those things, of course, except Starfleet Access' running commentary. But that hour's worth of inside anecdotes, delivered right alongside the episode footage referenced, is a pure delight for anybody devoted to the '60s series. The Blu-ray video looks amazing, too, in full 1080p, with booming 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio. And these Blu-ray discs are single-sided, where the DVD set's discs are double-sided -- the scratch-courting bane of any serious collector or casual viewer. It's too bad that only one other episode here gets the Starfleet Access storytelling treatment (Vulcan visit "Amok TIme"). Even a Trekker like me can learn plenty new about Trek mythology, word origins, backstage trivia (I sure never noticed that soup stain on the wall), and more. Who knew that Sulu and Chekov had a method behind their navigation-panel button-pushing madness? The most thoughtful anecdotes underscore the relative depth of the approach '60s Star Trek took to differing cultures, complex social issues and futuristic innovations. (Doctors now use Dr. McCoy's non-invasive shot technique to deliver flu vaccine.) You get a fine sense of writing/production challenges and on-the-fly creativity, as writers discuss creating character archetypes and cultural particulars that resound to this day -- the stoic Vulcans, their mating methods, et al. Another Blu-ray treat: exclusive BD-Live offerings you can view on your TV through your internet-connected player from an online network server . (Learn more here.) This isn't yet the most user-friendly experience -- downloads can take for-bleepin'-ever -- and the early extras on this set are a mixed bag. There are interview outtakes and writers gabbing amongst themselves; BD Live interviews with key behind-the-scenes players; featurettes on visual effects; Comic-Con and Creation convention footage and photos; and forums where users connect to each other. BD Live is designed to be ever-updatable -- in case they'd ever find "lost" footage, for example, or interview somebody new after the set's release -- but at this point that's pretty much hypothetical. Still, any real Trekker will want these seminal episodes on the best format, which for the moment is Blu-ray, with the fullest extras. And the price certainly isn't prohibitive, just $12 more than the remastered DVD with less content (Amazon prices as of Oct. 11, 2009). The new set's packaging in standard multidisc BD casing is vastly superior to the remastered DVD set's clunky hinged contraption holding a cheap book-page tray stack (one of those "collectible" things you hate every time you use it). These discs are much less likely to get damaged, and you won't hesitate to handle this set. Do we need yet another release of Star Trek anything? If you've been buying everything TOS since the beginning of DVD 10 years ago, you've spent thousands to buy the episodes individually on DVD, the original season set, the remastered season DVD box, and now the remastered Blu-ray season. It's a given that Paramount will keep going to this (remunerative) well as long as they can. (Do I see a fancy-schmancy full-'60s-series set on the horizon?) You can complain, you can hold out, you can sell the earlier sets on eBay, or you can just keep collecting. Up to you. At least we're getting fresher/deeper extras and ever-better video/audio quality. Haven't revisited these episodes in awhile? Then the blue box of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-ray is definitely worth your while. (Star Trek: The Original Series Season 1's yellow box came out in April 2009. Look for the red box of Season 3 on BD Dec. 15.) |
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THIRTYSOMETHING by Diane Werts Bet you thought it would never happen: That oh-so-'80s fave thirtysomething finally hits DVD. And it turns out to be oh-so-21st-century, too. "It's about the problem of trying to be a good man or woman in an impossible world," says series writer Richard Kramer, in one of the six-disc set's many illuminating extras. (Thanks, Shout Factory!) "There's nothing about being a yuppie in that," Kramer says. "That, I think, applies to everybody." "It's about trying to become grownups," says actress Patricia Wettig (who played Nancy), in the same DVD featurette that assesses the show's cultural impact. "How do you begin to have one of those real lives?" That wasn't something TV dealt with in the '80s, despite the arrival of smart adult dramas like St. Elsewhere, The Paper Chase and China Beach. Those shows were built around outward concerns -- medicine, law school, the Vietnam War. But thirtysomething was all about introspection -- young urban professionals, dissecting their lives-in-progress, aspiring to "have it all," yet stumbling through this unfamiliar game called adulthood. Which turned out to be played mostly through such everyday concerns as babies crying in restaurants, friends resenting your new parental obsession, bosses asking you to betray your ideals in pursuit of profit -- all those demands suddenly being juggled by pressured souls who'd so recently been blithe spirits. "Hill Street Blues had incorporated the personal into the procedural," says Timothy Busfield, cast member (Elliot) turned director-producer (Ed, Without a Trace), in a recent phone interview about the DVD release for my Sunday feature in Newsday about the show's profound (and continuing) influence on TV. "But we were just personal," Busfield says. "To be able to say, 'Here's how I'm sort of evaluating my life' -- the ability to connect with the audience, and sort of wink, and say, 'Hey, check it out, guys. Here's where we're blunderous, here's where we need to evolve.' To have that opportunity in television, which was primarily reserved for independent features, was at that time so rare." This was auteur TV. In a separate phone interview, series creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick stressed that they weren't alone in trying to subvert that wall separating writers and viewers by making it clear we were all muddling through together. "There was Glenn Gordon Caron with Moonlighting," says Zwick. "And John Sacret Young with China Beach," adds Herskovitz. (Another show too long MIA on DVD.) "But you have to understand how clueless we were," says Zwick. "We weren't veterans of television," says Herskovitz. "We were just applying what we'd learned in our own lives." On Shout's DVD set, the duo -- still working together making films like Blood Diamond -- revisit those stumbling-into-greatness days while trading memories in an editing bay. Both 35 at the time, they considered themselves movie makers, and wrote a TV pilot only under studio duress. "What could we do that we would like, if we had to do it, but would be certain to fail?" remembers Herskovitz. "The baby boomer generation is not represented on television. Why don't we write about the people we know?" Says Zwick, "It was about looking close to home, and inside." When thirtysomething premiered in 1987, TV's highest-rated drama was Murder, She Wrote. Even Dallas was still going strong. L.A. Law had become a feisty adult favorite, but its smirking quirks could hardly be called earnest or intimate. Which, of course, thirtysomething's pilot was (perhaps to excess). ABC's young programming executives were so moved, they bought the series. Zwick and Herskovitz were doing something radical, and though they had no illusions it would succeed in the ratings, at least it would make them happy. "We were so idealistic," Herskovitz muses on the DVD. "We couldn't abide the idea that this thing would be compromised. We were willing to walk away rather than make it bad." They hired writers who felt the same -- Richard Kramer, who'd go on to such smart shows as Tales of the City and Nothing Sacred. And Paul Haggis, whose TV gems Due South and EZ Streets led to the movies, an Oscar nomination for Million Dollar Baby, and a best picture win for Crash. Winnie Holzman would later create My So-Called Life for producers Zwick and Herskovitz. "We had this idea of what we called the dialectic," Herskovitz remembers on the DVD. That meant exploring their generation's "ambivalence, that things exist in opposition to each other. You want to be free, but you also want money." "You want to be single," says Zwick, "and you want to be in a relationship." "You want to please your client," says Herskovitz, "and you want to feel that you have integrity . . . Many of them were true meditations upon a theme." Meditations? Yes, network TV would actually take the time to stop and think -- thirtysomething indulged a measured, heartfelt humanity that even the best shows today lack the breathing room to convey. "I think in network television, that period of time stands alone," says Peter Horton, another actor (Gary) turned director-producer (The Philanthropist), in another recent phone interview. "There's been a real retreat from that kind of creative exploration and creative freedom. Sadly, network television has really ebbed away from that. They're going for much more dazzle and flash, trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace." That's why thirtysomething hasn't hit DVD until now. It "hadn't been a priority" for release at owning studio MGM, Herskovitz says by phone. "The studios have bigger to fish to fry," explains Garson Foos of Shout Factory, the pop culture distributor that steps up when large studios focus instead on recent productions more likely to sell big. Shout's loving releases have ranged from such recent faves as Freaks and Geeks and The Middleman all the way back to '60 single-camera sitcom pioneer Room 222, original nighttime soap Peyton Place, and Groucho Marx' You Bet Your Life -- all lavished with bonus archive footage, new interviews and more. "They really take it seriously," Zwick says. For thirtysomething, new video masters were struck to make the episodes look fresh, and Shout jumped through hoops to secure rights to the show's pioneering use of pop songs. Music rights are often the hold-up for vintage favorites stuck in the vault. "Because we're putting so much TV-on-DVD out that has music rights issues," Foos says by phone, "we're able to negotiate at least a little more favorable deals. Because we come from the music business [he and brother Richard Foos were behind Rhino], we have great relationships with the labels and publishers." The industry knows Shout brings the love, too. "When we feel like the show is really something that was important culturally," Foos says, they go to town. The thirtysomething box boasts specially produced retrospectives, interviews with all the cast and key crew, a variety of episode commentaries, and an insightful 40-page book about the show's impact as "an influential, very groundbreaking show. It's such good writing and storytelling and character development. I think those issues are the kinds of issues that people are grappling with always. It wasn't unique to that period of time." Except to those who watched at the time, emotionally immersed, as if seeing their own lives laid bare on screen. The actors, too, connected, not only to their characters but to the broader horizons being explored. Busfield and Horton weren't the only ones who'd move behind the camera (while also continuing to act occasionally). So did Ken Olin, now a producer-director on Brothers and Sisters, which costars his real-life wife Wettig. Ditto Melanie Mayron, recently directing In Treatment, and Polly Draper, who created her sons' Nickelodeon series The Naked Brothers Band. All got their feet wet doing episodes of thirtysomething. Horton says, "We called it Ed's samurai school of directing." So the show touched their hearts as profoundly as it did viewers. "It's been a pebble in our shoes all these years," Horton muses by phone. "Here we have this show that we so fully participated in and so adore, and we're living in a world of DVDs and shows living on at your command -- and it's every other show but ours. It was in obscurity on a shelf somewhere, and that was such a source of irritation and frustration. But I think with the idea that it's finally coming out, that's us finally getting to scratch that itch." Us, too. |
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LIFE ON MARS by Diane Werts It's a cop show, not some space exploration saga. Unless the space is inside your head. That's where 21st century police detective Sam Tyler seems to be trapped -- unless he has somehow actually awakened in the year 1973, where cops solve cases by using their fists, not forensics. Sam got hit by a car while David Bowie's song Life on Mars was playing on his iPod, and now suddenly finds himself working semi-familiar turf back in that era of head-cracking crimesolving, ubiquitous cigarette smoke and reeeeally bad fashion. The idea is inventive enough, and warped enough, that you just know it's not from American TV. Don't mistake this Life on Mars for ABC's ill-fated recent New York remake. The original's electric eight hours come from Britain, where networks let writers and their wild concepts run loose. And thank goodness. Whether it's the UK's gaudy/gritty casino lip-synch musical-mystery Viva Blackpool (ruined Stateside as Viva Laughlin), or Ricky Gervais' The Office (which lost-in-translation its eloquent poignance), or all the way back to John Cleese's Fawlty Towers (screwed up twice here, as Bea Arthur's Amanda's and John Larroquette's Payne), American "adaptations" never quite seize on the nucleic nugget that made the original explosive. They glom instead onto surface factors -- pop songs! office life! misanthropic farce! -- and then sledgehammer home the "peculiar" core concept to help us "understand" its supposed oddity. (Could the actors in NBC's The Office look at the camera more often, like we couldn't get that it's a mockumentary without incessant visual punctuation?) American TV also tends to cast stars who are less rough around the edges, less "ordinary," more "likable" and, where possible, exceedingly more famous. The BBC's Life on Mars gives us slim-faced Simm as the young time-wandering cop, with Philip Glenister as his hard-knuckled boss, both actors perhaps best known from another UK TV original, State of Play. For the Americanization, ABC tried to hype movie star Harvey Keitel as the chief and Sopranos wiseguy Michael Imperioli as a cynical squad colleague, over Sam-playing star Jason O'Mara (The Agency), a British ex-pat playing Noo Yawker. But none of them truly clicked into any kind of chemistry, or even conviction in their individual characters. Simm, on the other hand, makes his Sam magnetically itchy, so desperate to solve whether he's in some time warp, in a hallucinatory coma, truly insane, or watching things play out from The Great Beyond. He's much more inside his own head, hearing weird transmissions from his own 2006, where his girlfriend had been taken hostage by the killer whose trail he was hot on. But while he's living in 1973, he puts his "advanced" knowledge to good use, solving crimes with then-unknown modern techniques and visiting his childhood haunts as a much more savvy adult. Sometimes the times intermingle, as Sam crosses paths with veteran criminals in their formative stages. Can he change the future, even if he can't get back there? Societal progress is at play, too. Sam is a more enlightened guy when it comes to women and minorities, so there are decades' worth of cultural clashes. And there's a touch of romance. Sam connect with a sweet female officer (Liz White) who, despite her psychology training, remains confined to office assistance and male cops' crude comments. We learn more about all of that in Acorn's Region 1 DVD release, which includes commentaries on every episode, an hour making-of documentary (in two parts), a look at the '70s-inspired yet contemporary score, and a featurette on the show's retro production design. Two months after this Life on Mars finally hits US shelves July 28, the American remake arrives on disc, too: ABC's Life on Mars: The Complete Series (17 episodes) comes out Sept. 29. The UK's second (and final) season comes out on DVD here from Acorn on Nov. 24. |
NOWHERE MAN by Diane Werts As The Prisoner resurfaces in AMC's "reinterpretation" of the 1960s classic, we're reminded of another mindbending saga of a lone man battling nefarious forces trying to shake his faith in reality to get what they seek from him. Nowhere Man ran only one season of 25 episodes on UPN -- even the network's name is a flashback now -- but its provocative study of personal paranoia sticks in the memory of the viewers drawn to its chill. Bruce Greenwood (most recently Captain Pike in the Star Trek movie remake) played the photographer whose life turned upside down in seconds one random night. Returning to his table at a restaurant, his wife is gone and everyone claims not to know him. His home, his work, his family -- everything has been instantly "erased." He has no belongings, no identity, nothing but his wits. It's a conspiracy, of course. Everything was, back in the '90s X-Files era. What they (you know: They) want from Greenwood is the negative of a photo that seems to show a man being hung in Central America. (Or is it simply Hitchcock's tangential MacGuffin?) Photographer Thomas Veil is perpetually on the run, trying to unravel who's persecuting him, and why. Meanwhile, his tormenters devise ever more elaborate scenarios plunging him into alternate realities that might make him more "cooperative." Unlike The Prisoner, though, Veil is still in the real world. Isn't he? Nowhere Man plays more like an indie film than a TV show, all dark and broody, immersing us in Veil's desperation, his confusion, and also his ethical backbone. But it's more a visceral ride than a cerebral one. Greenwood carries the load intensely, with occasional appearances by Megan Gallagher as the enigmatic wife who no longer knows him (or does she?). But this nowhere man is ultimately alone. Perhaps we're all alone. And on the run, too. From others? Or from ourselves? Like The Prisoner, Nowhere Man is more about the questions than the answers. |
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THE ADDAMS FAMILY by Diane Werts Neat. Sweet. Petite. They're creepy and they're kooky. Mysterious and spooky. Altogether ooky! The Addams Family. (Snap, snap.) Just like their classic theme song, TV's uncanny clan remains awfully enduring, as fresh viewing of the '60s sitcom's complete-series DVD set illustrates. Morticia, Gomez, Fester, kids Pugsley and Wednesday, Cousin Itt, a resident lion, and hamburger-chomping plants -- the Addamses' seriously bizarre everyday adventures represent far more than merely the other monster-family airing on ABC at the same time CBS was running The Munsters (1964-66). The latter show's Frankenstein-and-Dracula kin may still have appeal for kids, or for any viewer vulnerable to towering star Fred Gwynne's versatility (Car 54, Where Are You? too! And My Cousin Vinny, with his immortal question "What is a yute?"). But The Addams Family has true inspiration. Their morose glee-in-gloom resounds in contrast to "regular" society with an oblivious but spirited relish, adapted from illustrator Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons of the black-clad folks in that delightfully dreary castle down the street. This is a show that's adult, which lots of '60s kids didn't realize while giggling over Uncle Fester's "electric" personality (lit bulb in mouth) or hair-covered dwarf Cousin Itt's unintelligible babble. John Astin's Gomez and Carolyn Jones' Morticia are actually smokin' hot. Wide-eyed, pin-striped and passionate, Astin practically devours his spider-like bride physically, smooching his way up her arm, every time she drops a word of French. The two take their parenting seriously, too, spending lots of time encouraging their children's creativity, whether that means son Pugsley's munitions-making or Wednesday's hand-slash-across-throat to explain her headless doll (she's a Marie Antoinette fan). And that house -- that gloriously ghoulish manse with its growling bearskin rug, the human leg in the mouth of that game fish on the wall, the bed of nails, the piranha tank, the relaxing Rack. Not to mention enormous and rumbling butler Lurch ("You rang?"), playing his dainty harpsichord numbers. And Thing, the disembodied helpful hand, forever popping out of a box on this table or that to deliver the mail or lift a ringing phone. (Don't even get us into Gomez and Morticia sitting there smoking that hookah.) There's a joyous zest to the Addams' lives that the sometimes simply dense Munsters lacked, and that energy stands them in good stead four decades later, when the show's laugh track might seem intrusive and the black-and-white visuals are dated. (But perfect! The blacker the better!) Gomez is forever relaxing by standing on his head, still smoking his omnipresent cigar. Morticia sits ensconsed in her wicker throne, knitting eight-armed sweaters for Pugsley's octopus. Then the music starts, and they're entwined in an amorous tango. Gomez just can't keep his hands off. These people savor every moment of their mad existence, so they never consider the notion that they're unconventional. Outsiders are the ones inexplicable in this universe, thankfully lacking a "normal" observer like the Munsters' pretty blonde niece Marilyn. The Addams' lives are complete unto themselves -- and way more inviting than whatever normality might offer. Thanks to buoyant performances that go whole-hog, the show's energy continues to feel contagious. Astin's deliriously bug-eyed money magnate has such an attention-deficit, we're never entirely certain that he isn't actually insane. (Which only adds to his heated magnetism.) Jones' serene Morticia actually rules the roost, cooing and stroking her husband into calm when he gets over-eager (again). Cueball-headed Uncle Fester -- a truly demented creation by Jackie Coogan, 45 years past his heartwrenching childhood work in Charlie Chaplin's silent classic The Kid -- radiates an impulsive adolescence, unruly but lovable, often needing to be talked out of violence or talked off the ledge. These actors commit with an authenticity that's sort of amazing, considering the extreme weirdness of what they're doing. But '60s TV was, after all, the proud purveyor of The Beverly Hillbillies (talk about commitment to peculiarity), and Green Acres (sometimes so far out there, it became literally surreal), and the supernatural suburbia of Bewitched (another show that wears well on DVD thanks to observant situations, adult writing and resolute performanes). All of these alternate-(un)reality sitcoms were shot single-camera, with their canned laugh tracks strategically added later; and they were largely confined to the studio, a controlled zone where the actors could truly go gonzo, figuring it would all be edited later into making its own singular sort of sense. Which it was. The Addams Family is tightly measured madness, which, if you haven't seen the show in awhile, will be seriously stranger than you remember. Watching now without commercial interruption lets you fully submerge in a surprisingly deep sea of eccentricity. The DVD extras are great, too -- interviews with Astin (now nearly 80 and teaching theater at Johns Hopkins!), grown-up kids Ken Weatherwax and Lisa Loring, unmasked Itt embody-er Felix Silla, and theme song writer Vic Mizzy, who also penned the equally explicative Green Acres theme. (Jones, Coogan and Ted "Lurch" Cassidy have passed away.) Their lingering fondness for it all is openly touching. Other DVD bonus features include a Charles Addams featurette, plus audio commentaries with cast members, Addams Family experts, and (ahem) characters like Lurch and Itt. The discs themselves are the dread double-sided kind -- easier to damage and conducive to confusion over which label-less side is which -- but the black-and-white video transfer is luminously crisp. MGM's 2007 full-series set is ideal, but also available are the earlier 3 separate volumes (each 2/3 of a season; go figure), containing the same bonus features. They really are a screa-um. The Addams Family. (Snap, snap.) |
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| BARNEY MILLER
by Diane Werts Here's a great way to create comedy: Open the door to a parade of fresh crazies weekly. Have your colorful ensemble cast try to solve their problems, while hauling in their own odd issues. Be topical. Be loony. Stir the pot. Serve. It sure worked for Barney Miller, and then for Night Court, two of TV's most enduring comedies. And though both have been coming out on DVD for awhile, they're only now releasing the seasons where the recipe started to pay off. These series premiered in an era where the networks had time to let shows simmer until they developed their own distinct flavor. It took each concept three seasons to get really tasty. And viewers have since been chowing down for decades. Barney Miller tapped the concept first, debuting at midseason 1975 as an ABC police comedy about a lovable but harried detective chief (Hal Linden), the nuts in his precinct squadroom (both employed there and arrested into), and Barney's understanding wife (Barbara Barrie). The home life didn't really work, and the wife's appearances quickly dwindled to occasional guest shots. But the detectives and the citizenry -- those groups turned into comic gold under the quirky eye of Danny Arnold, a producer whose previous claim to fame had been the initial episodes of Bewitched. Even there, Arnold had an eye for the odd -- those early Bewitcheds remain the cream of the crop, introducing such insane inspirations as dotty witch Aunt Clara (with her prized collection of stolen doorknobs). With Barney Miller, it quickly became clear that traditional TV sentiment -- still big in the '70s -- would take a back seat to the lunatic fringe. Into lower Manhattan's 12th Precinct strolled dwarf robbers, crooked priests, sex clinic operators, foreign defectors, would-be suicides, phone breathers, well-armed vigilantes and the tube's first gay recurring characters. But these assorted nuts wouldn't have worked without great regulars to bounce off of, and over the first three seasons, Arnold found them. Max Gail's ex-Marine Wojo -- simple, excitable, sweet-hearted, perpetually late for work -- was an original cast member. Jack Soo's lazy older cop Yemana made terrible coffee, made friends with bookies, and misfiled everything. Ron Glass' natty Harris soon arrived, getting ready to write his book and get famous. It took awhile to get Steve Landesberg's dry know-it-all Dietrich and Ron Carey's short but feisty uniformed officer Levitt. And James Gregory's lonely, useless Inspector Luger simply wandered into Barney's office one episode and lingered. The early seasons had other cops who didn't quite stick -- Gregory Sierra's Chano, Linda Lavin's Wentworth, and of course Abe Vigoda's Fish, the aging grouch who got a spinoff show (Fish) and quickly disappeared. But the core group began coalescing in the third season, now finally out on DVD, with its smog alert, werewolf visit, cops' strike, health quarantine, and Fish in drag as a mugging decoy. (Mugging! New York was fun city in the '70s.) Anyone could walk in, and anything could happen. Which taught Barney Miller writer Reinhold Weege a lesson or two that he put to good use on his own creation several seasons later. Weege got a midseason 1984 NBC debut for his Night Court, moving the stream-o'-cons concept from the squadroom to the courtroom, led not by a sage veteran cop but a sage new judge played by comic magician Harry Anderson. It was a colossal case of miscasting that worked like a charm -- the 30-ish judge doing magic tricks on the bench and mooning about his smooth jazz crooner Mel Torme, when not offering folksy wisdom from the mouth of a counterculture baby. Some of the people to play off him came right away -- John Larroquette's randy, ambitious prosecutor Dan Fielding and Richard Moll's towering tank of a dim bailiff called Bull. But the original defense attorney (too-straight Paula Kelly) didn't click, and neither did the second season's (too-funky Ellen Foley). But that year brought a guest appearance by Markie Post, who'd join up as all-American Princess Di lover Christine Sullivan in the third year, when Night Court hit high gear. Stick-in-the-mud clerk Karen Austin gave way that second season to roll-with-the-punches Charles Robinson. One element that did work, casting early-TV comedy writer and deadpan drawler Selma Diamond as Bull's seen-it-all bailiff sidekick, was unfortunately lost with Diamond's death after that second esason. But much more was found, and Night Court hit a stride nearly as impressive as Barney Miller's, though it took a wilder, less realistic tack. The courtroom sometimes seemed to be a live-action cartoon, which isn't surprising since the second season came from such writers as Nat Mauldin, who'd go on to create Steven Bochco's ill-fated animated series Capitol Critters, and Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn, who'd make cult cartoon Duckman. Yet Night Court also laid harder on heart and sentiment than Barney Miller, where Arnold remained proudly iconoclastic. And Weege's show got a bit goopier over the years, with marriages taking place and babies being born, all of which Barney deftly avoided. (Barney instead flirted with divorce.) But it worked, thanks to that unending parade, with peculiar people marching in and marching out, keeping the flow going, and giving the regular crazies forever something fresh to flake out about. Both shows were produced on videotape, too, giving the proceedings more immediacy than filmed shows like Cheers. In fact, Barney Miller broke ground in tape production, then perceived as making sitcoms look cheap and stagy. Arnold tried more filmic lighting, and eventually booted out the studio audience, allowing him to shoot the show from different angles, with pacing designed to please the home viewer rather than those in the soundstage bleachers. (While you still hear laughter, it was collected by showing finished episode tapes to studio audiences.) Barney Miller thus retains a sort of timelessness, even with its then-topical plots, which makes me wonder why TV comedies don't return to videotape for its you-are-there vibe. With high definition video now, taped shows could look just as crisp as filmed shows. That lack of visual nuance hurts old videotape shows now being watched on DVDs and TVs with crystal clarity. (Even All in the Family can give you a glare headache.) But Barney Miller still looks great, its low-contrast visuals and depth of shadow making that squadroom feel not fake or claustrophobic but authentic and cozy. Besides, both Barney Miller and Night Court have sharp jazz theme songs to which you can do a mean hambone. [Amazon prices above are current as of July 13.] |
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BREAKING BAD by Diane Werts A man who has nothing left to lose is a dangerous thing. And a shocking thing. And a funny thing. And perhaps the most inventively entertaining thing, per hour, on television today. Breaking Bad arrives on DVD packed with visceral humanity, its seven episodes oozing life like the blood seeping from the various victims of its dying good-guy protagonist's missteps on the road to providing for his family after he's gone. Bryan Cranston won an Emmy for this amazing portrayal, where not a second rings false or even premeditated. The sitcom dad of Malcolm in the Middle strips gears here for his bravura dramatic turn without ever losing hapless Hal's can-do comic bravado. Cranston's Walter White is even more everyday a character -- an earnest high school chemistry teacher who might have been a Nobel Prize winner, but seriously underachieved. At least professionally. Personally, he's always been a mensch, if such terms apply in the arid air of Albuquerque, as a loyal husband to his everyday wife, loving dad to their 15-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, and stepping-up provider for their unplanned baby on the way as he sheepishly celebrates his 50th birthday. But the everyday is about to go gonzo. Walter learns he's dying of inoperable lung cancer, then spots a slacker former student fleeing cops from his homemade meth lab. Discovering how much money he can make to "cook" the street drug, Walter decides to break bad with the kid, sharing a chemistry kitchen in pursuit of $737,000 to support his family after he's gone. The number doesn't surface till AMC's second TV season, which begins March 8, but the new first-season DVD set is a prerequisite to the deeper, darker ride Walter is about to take. He's forever "Mr. White" to student Jesse Pinkman, a youthful loser whose disappointed ex-teacher joins him to buy a broken-down RV and cook in the distant desert, returning to town to wholesale their stuff to some seriously scary street sellers. The body count continues to grow (usually gruesomely) as Walter's fear level shrinks. With nothing left to lose, and all those prospective thousands to fund his family's life without him, Walter starts walking tall in ways he's never imagined, and getting himself into gangster scrapes that surprisingly faze him not one bit. Cranston simply inhabits this guy suddenly living outside his own skin. He's still so average that fridge magnets scattered on the kitchen floor signify to his son that something's amiss in their always ordered lives. Yet dad barely blinks now when killing is called for. Aaron Paul is right there with him as Pinkman, initially mostly a source of convenience and comedy, who gradually emerges as a rootless and scarred soul, cast out by his frustrated parents, virtually friendless, unmotivated yet desperate to matter. Which he suddenly does to "Mr. White." Breaking Bad is gravely threatening from the start, but it's also consistently funny, alternately framing Walter's situation as dramatically dire and yet another sitcom "predicament" -- a pairing that provides surprising juice. His brother-in-law, a strutting DEA agent played by Dean Norris, is another keen portrait of straddling the line between comedy and carnage. That guy's wife (Betsy Brandt) is a troubled/competitive sister to Walter's wife (Anna Gunn), who rolls with whatever her suddenly secretive hubby throws her way. Her love, concern and suspicion play as reflections of the many faces of Walter. The son embodied by actor RJ Mitte clearly belongs to these parents. His physical challenges, in walking and talking, only make his brain more dynamic in observing what's going on. Without much to do or say, his attitudes speak volumes. Because series creator Vince Gilligan comes off years of writing for The X-Files, he's a revelation here, providing a depth of nuance that makes these characters more human in the first 10 minutes than those folks were in 10 years. The pilot, which Gilligan wrote and also directed (and was Emmy-nominated for), sets a tone of cinematic artfulness that deftly approaches the too-clever line without stepping over. The wide desert vistas and claustrophobically homely households provide sublime settings for these characters. But they also afford set pieces that linger in the mind -- those creature-feature gas masks, Walt's underwear strip-down, evidence going up in flames or down in chemical dissolution, the family's newly painted nursery stashed with ill-gotten gains. Every moment of Breaking Bad feels fresh. If something initially seems familiar -- the cowboy DEA dude, c'mon -- it's quickly made part of a complex human equation. Speaking of equations -- well, chemistry -- even the show credits are evocative, each name having letters highlighted as an element from the periodic table (BReaking BAd). On other shows, this trick might be too clever by half. Here, it's just another sly piece of a puzzle that forms into something altogether unlike anything we expected. Of course, we, and Gilligan, haven't finished it yet . . . DVD extras only take us deeper into Walter's journey, and inside the production, starting with an unusually revealing pilot commentary track (under the special features menu). Gilligan, Emmy-winning editor Lynne Willingham and the entire cast banter with a relaxed cameraderie that hints why their onscreen work feels so unfussy. Also included are AMC's backstage featurettes, its Shootout interview session, and the actors' original screen tests. |
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OPPENHEIMER by Diane Werts "The father of the atomic bomb" is nothing new to PBS, even if the American Experience documentary The Trials of Robert J. Oppenheimer is. Back in 1980, the controversial nuclear physicist was the subject of a docudrama miniseries with Sam Waterston that's still remembered as one of public TV's finest (seven) hours. And a mere 28 years later, Oppenheimer has finally made it to DVD. Waterston is a bigger star today, of course, thanks to his seemingly unending run on Law & Order. (And those ubiquitous TD Ameritrade commercials.) But his real talent seems to be flesh-and-blood embodying real-life American originals like Oppenheimer or Abraham Lincoln. (Wouldn't this year's Lincoln bicentennial be perfect timing for a high-quality DVD of his robust 1988 ABC two-parter Gore Vidal's Lincoln, with Mary Tyler Moore as a devastating Mary Todd?) In Oppenheimer, Waterston is scary-good as the lanky, pensive, sometimes naive genius, who's dramatized through the most publicly crucial years of his life -- from rising as a Berkeley professor in the late '30s, through his key work on World War II's Manhattan Project, on to his postwar rethinking of nuclear weapons after seeing their effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally through the mid-'50s red-scare hearings covered docu-style by American Experience. The series' dramatic momentum is even more impressive considering how much "action" takes place among men sitting in potentially claustrophobic classrooms, offices, labs or hearing rooms. That's largely a tribute to the internal passions Waterston conveys as "Oppy" wades through political, military and scientific scramblings for position and power. He's as multifaceted as his equations, though much less fixed, always open and probing, even self-doubting, and clearly more suited to his later work among fellow thinkers at the Institute for Advanced Study than he was to the rough-and-tumble of politics. This comes into sharp focus thanks to the sole but sterling bonus feature included in the three-disc DVD set -- a 1955 episode of Edward R. Murrow's CBS series See It Now, where the legendary newsman sits down with the real-life Oppenheimer to discuss the work of the Institute he was then heading. At one time, network "reality" really was real. Like many PBS classics, Oppenheimer was produced in partnership with the BBC, which often seems to understand the importance of American historical figures better than we do. That outside eye adds to the depth and scope of Oppenheimer, as it had to that earlier BBC-PBS miniseries The Adams Chronicles (also directed by Barry Davis). It also provides sharp support from across-the-pond performers like David Suchet (Poirot), here cast as fellow scientist Edward Teller, whose aggressive postwar showdown with Oppenheimer provides the series its most crackling conflict. Historical narration throughout doesn't detract from the drama but rather enables it, pre-empting the need for awkward expository dialogue. That allows Oppenheimer to maintain the kind of intimate impact that brought the project such contemporary acclaim -- and such lingering fondness as to inspire an ultra-rare clean sweep in Amazon's customer reviews: All 39 comments award the show five stars. Not even a single disaffected viewer? Now that's something new. |
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THE PRISONER 40th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTOR'S EDITION by Diane Werts "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!" Ah, yes, Patrick McGoohan as Number 6. "I am not a number. I am a person." Was TV ever so surreal? Certainly not back in 1968, when McGoohan's glorious mind game hit the CBS airwaves, undoubtedly confusing lots of Beverly Hillbillies-era viewers -- and tantalizing the minds of open-minded others, to whom The Prisoner would become an enduring exploration of individualism vs. conformity. The U.K.-produced show seemed strikingly of its time -- the counterculture vs. "the establishment" -- but has turned out to be timeless. So timeless that AMC is revisiting the concept in an upcoming series with James Caviezel as Number 6 and Ian McKellen as his chess-match minder Number 2. And who is Number 1? That is the question . . . The best way to tackle it is The Prisoner 40th anniversary DVD box set, a slim-cased 10-disc delight that also serves up a 60-page "Ultimate Series Companion Guide" and a full-color "Map of Your Village," locating The Mountains, The Sea, Citizens Advice Bureau, Palace of Fun and other useful sites. The Village is, of course, the fairy tale town/prison in which our unnamed hero finds himself always under ominous surveillance. He's played by series creator McGoohan, through 17 mind-tickling episodes, as an apparent resigned spy who's been kidnapped and spirited away to play cat-and-mouse with various men called Number 2, forever in search of Number 1, and hopeful of escape. His peculiar fellow prisoners have their own backstories and motives, never quite so clear as they might be. But then neither was McGoohan's nameless character, widely assumed to be some variation of his operative from the earlier Danger Man/Secret Agent series, now disillusioned and dangerous to his handlers. He doesn't know who's holding him or where. He knows only that they want "in-for-ma-tion." So the tug-of-war begins. The Prisoner remains imposing not just for its mindbending attitudes, but also its meticulously stylized look. The real village used for exteriors (Welsh resort town Portmeirion) would become a tourist attraction. The font used in signage there (an adaptation of Albertus) remains indelibly linked to the show, along with that artfully designed Village map. So too, do such symbols as the logo's penny farthing bicycle, such settings as that circular high-tech "control room," such costumes as McGoohan's piped blazer, and such props as that weather balloon/escapee retrieval device called Rover. The show's quaint locations played against its futuristic tales of dream invasion and human doubles. There had never been anything quite like The Prisoner. And four decades later, despite the likes of Twin Peaks, there still hasn't been. McGoohan teased viewers with existential questions for which he left only ambiguous clues. Yet his sometimes hallucinatory tale still provided an exhilarating ride. At a time in TV's young life when most of its shows seemed brain dead (not that there's anything wrong with that), The Prisoner demanded attention and thought, not to mention drawing your own conclusions, about both plot and principle. The discs themselves offer bonus alternate footage, location film, promos, production manager interviews and the 48-minute "Prisoner Video Companion," crammed with behind-the-scenes info, analysis and copious clips. What the set doesn't provide is answers. That would be telling. And that would ruin everything. Which makes us wonder how AMC's upcoming Prisoner redo will resonate. During TV critics' January press tour, new Number 2 McKellen promised the production would offer much more clarity: "By Episode 6, you'll know everything about The Village, where it came from, who created it and why, what it's like to actually live there." What fun is that? The joy of The Prisoner for 40 years now has been the deliberation and debate it inspires, with creator-star McGoohan helpfully refusing to clarify ambiguities right up to his recent death at age 80. And that's the way we Prisoner devotees like it. Be seeing you! |
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BURKE'S LAW SEASON 1, VOLUME 2 by Diane Werts What a glorious golden oldie this '60s detective romp turns out to be! It's like a weekly TV version of the sparkling Hollywood formula flicks made at the height of the studio age. The effervescent episodes are crammed with big star names, colorful characters, predictable tricks, sassy wit and happily-ever-after endings. All good. Because Burke's Law is uber-Aaron Spelling, made at a time his glossy showbiz style wasn't yet out of style, when the "eye candy" producer went for dialogue candy, too, and drollery, and quirky characters, and suave sophistication. Never miss a chance to savor it -- "Burke's law." Gene Barry says this at least once an episode, playing millionaire/L.A. police captain Amos Burke, who arrives at high-profile crime scenes in his chauffeur-driven Rolls. He's prone to spouting aphorisms of behavior -- yet another "Burke's law" -- to his world-weary second (Regis Toomey, forever in a hat) and his theory-spouting young assistant (Gary Conway), who reliably finishes the latest investigative step before Burke asks him to undertake it. Burke always interviews the babes himself, trotting 'round town with his Asian-babbler driver/valet (Leon Lontoc), and usually starts and/or ends each episode in the arms of some bullet-bra'ed dame. In the meantime, he and his boys make the rounds interviewing all the suspects, usually played by one-time Hollywood stars for whom Spelling provides a ripe playground. (And a damn sight smarter one than The Love Boat would be, 15 game-changed years later.) Just one episode on this new Volume 2 features: golden-age stars Mickey Rooney and Linda Darnell, up-and-comers Elizabeth Montgomery and Telly Savalas, plus, just for weirdness, Gale Storm and Bert Parks (doing a vaudeville song and dance!). Like every story, the saga starts with a dead body, and then the bizarre little character cameos parade past. Burke makes wry comments, Toomey offers that all-knowing smile, and Conway looks simultaneously smug and callow, always knowing Burke's gonna get the girl, not him. Even the episode titles are comforting cliches, each starting "Who Killed," followed by the victim's name or description. But all that prescribed structure leaves the writers free to play in other ways. The scripts generally overflow with delicious little rejoinders and asides. Even better for us modern viewers, Burke's Law features more, and more slyly blatant, double entendres than any other show of its era. It was always lustfully clear that Amos Burke wasn't just inviting his lady friends over for dinner. He was way too breezy bachelor pad/Rat Pack-era cool to let the evening end with dessert. Sure, it's all ephemeral nonsense. But how diverting can TV get? Burke's Law never aspires to be "smart," just juicily entertaining. Soooo relaxing. At our house, we watch this frothy concoction in bed late at night, though not, alas, with martinis in hand. Eh, who needs 'em? This show is intoxicating enough, as is. Oh, one more thing. Drool over this partial list of the great guests in the 16 episodes of Volume 2 -- Dick Clark, Spike Jones, Kevin McCarthy, Carolyn Jones, Dorothy Lamour, Jim Backus, William Shatner, Ed Wynn, Tab Hunter, Barbara Eden, Jayne Mansfield, Don Ameche, John Cassavetes, Jackie Coogan, Ruta Lee, Susan Strasberg, Agnes Moorehead, Betty Hutton and -- ta da! -- Buster Keaton. You gotta watch. It's "Burke's law." |
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M SQUAD POLICE SQUAD! Paramount, $20 list by Diane Werts The unmarked car cruising city streets comes to a tire-screeching halt. The stern-faced occupant bails out. He pulls a gun, he crouches, and shots burst forth. It's the title sequence of . . . Police Squad!? Right. Both. The new full-series DVD release of M Squad lets us compare Lee Marvin's hardnosed '50s copfest with Leslie Nielsen's dead-on '80s parody. If the latter takes nothing seriously -- deliriously un-seriously -- M Squad is its fruitfully grave-faced source material. Marvin is never anything but dour, even when he has to kiss a suspect's wife to provoke her jealous killer husband into overplaying his hand. Clearly, it's all work to Chicago police Lt. Frank Ballinger, and his equally deadpan captain (Paul Newlan). Ballinger tramps the pavement checking leads and steers his car chasing hunches, with Marvin recapping just-the-facts in stone-tone narration. He berates suspects, breaks into their rooms, lies to get the goods, and pretty much lords it over the universe. He knows every petty crook. He nails 'em. He doesn't have time for sympathy. He's The Man. Sound terrible? M Squad is actually a perverse reprieve from today's textured copfests. It's single-minded, single-storied, no-nuance crimesolving. Over and done in 24 minutes. Everything is straightforward black-and-white, including of course the visuals of this 1957-60 NBC Friday night stalwart. These film prints have been run through the mill a few times, which in their own odd way feels comforting -- each commercial-warning frame-corner holepunch serving as practical punctuation from an ingenuous era. (A bit more subtle, or at least artistic, is the sleek "crime jazz" score from Count Basie and other jazz giants, highlighted here in a bonus soundtrack CD.) So then watch Police Squad! -- a colored-in mirror image. The spoof's opening sequence is a dead-on duplicate of Marvin's, and so is the dollar-nighty-eight production design, with the sparse squadroom and those suspect apartments that look as if they've never been lived in. The back lot "locations" may be a bit too set-dressed, considering that M Squad episodes always show the same generic storefronts labeled Beauty Shop and Jewelry Store. But Nielsen's six-episode ABC series (from the guys behind the Airplane! movie) certainly nails the no-nonsense attitude, before ladling on goofy puns, silly names, misinterpretations, oversimplifications and guest stars dead before the opening credits. Today, Nielsen is better known from his later Naked Gun movie interpretation, but his dense Lt. Frank Drebin was born in this TV incarnation -- a single-camera flop that most 1982 viewers simply didn't get. A cult following did. And that's what led to Drebin's movie career. The laughs in these episodes are plenty if you're paying attention -- which the series' creators say in an sporadically interesting commentary proved to be the '80s problem. Viewers then weren't used to TV episodes demanding much concentration. But DVD is great for that. You can run the shows again and again, catching every crammed-in gag (like the words Police Squad painted on the office door window facing two different directions, one looking in, one looking out). Police Squad! churned through reams of wit in every episode, which would have made the humor hard to sustain over a lengthy run. Easier to simply set up a bad guy and smack him down. Just ask Lee Marvin. M Squad - Police Squad! - |
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WAGON TRAIN by Diane Werts You wanna talk all-star cast? Let's look at the guest stars crammed into the new Wagon Train box of 32 seventh season episodes, the hit western's only year in color. Barbara Stanwyck. Carolyn Jones. Peter Falk. Richard Loo. Michael Rennie. Suzanne Pleshette. Annette Funicello. Bruce Dern. David Carradine. And Ronald Reagan. And that's only in the first ten episodes. Down the line come Joan Blondell, Rhonda Fleming, Barbara Bain, Archie Moore, Burgess Meredith, Martin Balsam, Tom Skerritt and dozens more. Takes plenty of folks to fill up these 90 minute episodes. Finally, they're showing up on authorized DVDs, though these aren't Wagon Train's early seasons with Ward Bond and Robert Horton that zoomed to the top of the Nielsens when the craze for western series was at its height. (Amazing fact: The 1958-59 season hosted 31 westerns on the three-network schedule!) This is the next-to-last 1963-64 season, which starred John McIntire, Robert Fuller and Scott (later to be Denny) Miller. The DVD prints haven't been restored, either, which is too bad, since they've faded a tad over the past 45 years and occasionally show a little wear and tear. But that's easy to overlook, just to have this feast of Wagon Train-iana on your shelf. The gift-worthy set -- and you know you need to buy something for dad -- also includes new half-hour interviews with Fuller and Miller (illustrated by clips), plus 16 new-to-DVD "classic" episodes from throughout the hourlong black-and-white years, some featuring Bond and Horton (and some of them discussed in the interviews). It's certainly a trip seeing Stanwyck read cowpokes the riot act in what feels like a tough-talking audition for The Big Valley, not to mention watching Reagan as a worried stockade captain with a wacko wife, in one of his final acting roles before running for governor of California on his way to the White House. Of course, there are also peculiar moments where you have to wonder about mid-century Hollywood's penchant for casting blue-eyed actors in brownface as Comanches. Mostly, though, it's a welcome trip back to a simpler and more leisurely era. These movie-length episodes play like plays, with a defined beginning, middle and end, and usually some sort of personal lesson or moral involving the guest stars who dominate each westward-driving tale. Despite the shoot-'em-up ambiance, and those outdoor locations, Wagon Train is fairly talky, with lengthy scenes and a sense of intimacy that make a nice change of pace from today's flashy quick-cut dramas. Two points of information. Timeless has provided no captions or subtitles on the set, which might be a dealbreaker for some folks. And the discs are packed in the world's most unwieldy foldout set, which when fully opened stretches about as wide as I am tall. But it's still a pretty good deal, when you can order it from Amazon.com (click BUY NOW) for $2.25 per extended episode. (The official release date is Nov. 11.) There's enough here to keep you watching for about as long as that 19th century wagon train took to travel west. |
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Profit The Complete Series Anchor Bay, 3 discs, $30 list price by Diane Werts Some people will do absolutely any reckless, ruthless, cutthroat thing in order to win. And we aren't even talking politics. We're talking business, and revenge, and personal spite. (No, not politics.) We're talking Profit, a gleefully dark and vicious drama of dazzling wit. Try getting all those things into a TV hit. You can't. Which is why this 1996 Fox tour de force starring Heroes mainstay Adrian Pasdar only produced eight episodes and didn't even get all those onto the air. But oh, how those few of us who caught the show loved the show, and continued to worship intensely enough to get this DVD set released. The title (anti)hero of Profit is a killer. Literally. And figuratively, as a soulless, merciless corporate climber determined to scale the heights of a powerful conglomerate so he can take it down for reasons revealed to be shockingly personal. When we say Jim Profit was so abused as a kid that he slept in a cardboard box, we kid you not. That put him into a box of another kind, from which he pursues vengeance with a single-mindedness that's chilling in a way TV rarely portrays. And he was raised by yet another box, the one on which we observe his actions, which goes a long way toward explaining why he's so slick, charming and ultimately heartless. Pasdar plays it perfectly, all of it -- the charm, the evil, the warped neediness, the preening self-satisfaction, and the devilish humor. This much darkness can only be this delightful with a spritz of tongue-in-cheek to leaven the menace, and creators David Greenwalt (Angel) and John McNamara (Fastlane) slide that into the dry narration by which Profit takes us into his confidence. A worthy adversary helps, too, and Profit has some great ones -- Lisa Zane as an equally tortured security expert who's onto his game from the get-go, Scott Paulin as an upright executive who stands in his path, Keith Szarabajka as the top-dog CEO. He's also got great conscripted accomplices, ranging from helplessly blackmailed secretary Lisa Darr to Profit's own "mom," Lisa Blount as his sex-using, substance-abusing stepmother. But we don't know about the "step" at first, which makes their initial nuzzling another moment of kinky delirium. Taking advantage of being on Fox, Profit provides those as a sub-specialty. While Pasdar outmaneuvers the men, he romances their women, doing both in as many deranged ways as possible. Yet it's never too-too, because Pasdar is so delightfully controlled. He doesn't go in for gloating, really, or pity, and certainly not soul-searching. That's what's most sinister about Profit. He's so -- well, businesslike. Dapper and witty, too, but only as a means to his twisted end. Saying anything more would be saying too much. Profit provides too much delicious discovery along the way to indulge in spoilers. The joyride costs barely $20 at Amazon.com, for a weekend's worth of yummy viewing (with a smart hour documentary and episode commentaries to put the perversity in perspective). And many happy/heartless replays thereafter. |
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Honey West The Complete Series VCI, 4 discs, $40 list price by Diane Werts Here's proof that TV DVD prayers can be answered: Honey West has finally been released! I've only been waiting decades to see Anne Francis' private eye back in her sleek black catsuit, karate-chopping the bad guys. Her 1965-66 half-hour ABC series was my holy grail, forever searched-for, seemingly unfindable. Back in the 1980s when I lived in Dallas, I actually made a pilgrimage to NYC's Museum of Television & Radio (now The Paley Center for Media) to watch their collection's one prized episode. On videotape, yet. How times have changed. Now all 30 Honey West episodes come in one slim and affordable package ($30 from Amazon) of 4 shiny discs that encapsulate all my childhood dreams and aspirations -- Honey in her hip bachelorette pad with the automatic sliding doors and the sunken bathtub. Living with Bruce, her ornery pet ocelot, and Aunt Meg, her too-cool confidant. Matching wits with blustering Sam Bolt, her dead dad's private eye partner, who insists sleuthing is no line of work for girls. (Not women. It's the Mad Men era.) But Honey just smirked her Anne Francis-mole smirk and set off on adventures anyway, in her groovy white British sports convertible -- equipped with a car phone! (So there, Joe Mannix!) She'd be garbed in that iconic catsuit, with its black spike-heeled miniboots, or maybe, if she was outwardly undercover, in some swank Nolan Miller gown and furs. Honey knew karate and judo, so she never flinched from physically corralling her criminal quarry. She was elegant, and earthy. Sexy, and smart. And armed with not just guns but more electronic gadgets than even those men from U.N.C.L.E. (Love the two-way-radio sunglasses with their pop-up antenna!) Seeing the episodes again as an adult, I'm now also struck by the intelligence that a thirtysomething Anne Francis (Forbidden Planet, Bad Day at Black Rock) brings to what might otherwise have come off as a cartoon. Some of the episode plots are fairly far out there. One half-hour puts Honey in disguise as a gypsy in a desert caravan, then zips her to a ritzy resort with an underground-bunker jail cell from which escapes a vicious attack ape! Interspecies fistfight to follow! But if the stories don't always hold up, the black-and-white show's sense of style sure does. Honey West was the first series executive-produced by the prolific Aaron Spelling (Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, Dynasty), and his glossy template is clear, with all its high fashion, high adventure and highly attractive eye-candy cast. DVD distributor VCI has done a superb job digitally mastering the video, which looks more crisp and clear than you'd expect after four decades in storage. They've added a giddy bonus, too -- original 1960s commercials and ABC network promos, in all their slow-moving, simple-minded glory. From Dippity-Do hair-setting goo to golf legend Arnold Palmer hawking cigarettes by puffing away on the green, the ads unreel by the dozen on every disc. Honey West is ultimately a time trip back to an era when cigarette commercials were ubiquitous and empowered women were the rarity -- a backwards world. Now tobacco is the oddity and Sydney Bristow role models are everywhere. Before Alias, before even The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and The Bionic Woman, there was Honey West, fast-forwarding toward the future. And looking fabulous doing it. |
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Lateline The Complete Series by Diane Werts He could be the only U.S. senator who's starred in his own sitcom. Al Franken isn't just a former Saturday Night Live scribe, Stuart Saves His Family star, and agitprop book author. Minnesota's current Democratic Senate candidate also created and played the lead in NBC's 1998 prime time comedy Lateline. Where else could you see real-life politicos Dick Gephardt and Robert Reich warbling Buddy Hackett's Music Man ditty Shipoopi? An in-joke parody of ABC's Nightline, with a splash of Sports Night, the show didn't last long, and its quality was uneven. But the idea was coolly smart -- Franken as a haplessly "serious" news correspondent for a late-night report that hosted cameos from current events characters like the two mentioned above and larger-than-life G. Gordon Liddy, who seemed to be playing someone playing himself. Not to mention veteran comic Hackett, playing himself, practically having a coronary after the show reports an internet rumor that he'd died. And Paul Simon. And Conan O'Brien. Franken's policy wonk Al Freundlich (Froynd-lick) worked with a top-notch crew, too, at least in terms of real-life TV talent -- Megyn Price (Rules of Engagement) as his loyal producer, Miguel Ferrer (Crossing Jordan) as his frustrated boss, Robert Foxworth as the (what else?) arrogantly preening anchor. Sanaa Lathan broke through as a too-cool guest booker before segueing to movies like Love & Basketball (and tube twists like Nip/Tuck). None of their characters could control the dweebish Freundlich, who in true sitcom fashion was forever getting himself into reportorial scrapes like getting clobbered by a car airbag. Maybe that was the problem. Lateline seemed too sitcom-ish for political satire and too wonk-ish for time-killing comedy. Despite the smarts of Franken and series partner John Markus, who'd worked on The Larry Sanders Show, their joint project never achieved that HBO fave's neo-realistic tone. Not that a broadcast network sitcom airing alongside Friends and Seinfeld ever could. Lateline remains worth a look, though, as a true curio of an era when sitcoms were starting to lose steam and the networks were trying anything to find the next something. They're still trying. |
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Mad Men The Complete First Season by David Bianculli Lionsgate's first-season DVD set of Mad Men, AMC's first, fabulous weekly drama series, is out now -- and if there's one thing that will make this long, hot summer of TV doldrums more tolerable, this is it... Mad Men is set at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960 -- when men were chauvinists, women wore bullet bras, and everyone smoked like the chimney tops in Mary Poppins. Three-martini lunches were common. So were office affairs, ambitious jockeying for position, and secrets. Lots of secrets. Matthew Weiner, a talented writer on The Sopranos, created this series, and started out by getting the cast and look exactly right. Jon Hamm stars as Don Draper, a dashing ad exec with a beautiful blonde wife (January Jones as Betty), more than one woman in his peripheral orbit, and some deep, dark secrets in his distant past. He and his new secretary, Elisabeth Moss as Peggy, are at the core of Mad Men, but it's populated by an office full of captivating characters. There's John Slattery from Desperate Housewives as Don's boss, Roger Sterling, and Vincent Kartheiser (the wayward son on Angel) as Don's office nemesis, Pete Campbell. Most arrestingly of all, there's Christina Hendricks as Joan, the woman who rules the office using a variety of ploys and weapons -- sex appeal being no small part of her arsenal. At least a half dozen other actors and characters also shine in this series, which captures, with delicious wit and delightful details, 1960 in all its glory and folly, up to and including the Nixon-Kennedy presidential election. The grace notes, throwaway lines and period-perfect props all add to the fun. If you're old enough, you may gasp with recognition, seeing once again items you'd long forgotten -- aluminum beer cans that you pierce with sharp-pointed openers, IBM electric typewriters with unwieldy plastic covers, plastic transistor radios. And if you're too young to remember them, you're the right age to be amused and fascinated by them. After an overly obvious pilot episode, Mad Men evolves quickly into a brilliant, subtle TV show, a multilayered character study and an incisive social commentary all at once. Weiner has created a wonderful window into the past, and watching Mad Men on DVD is the ultimate way to enjoy it. Mix some martinis, sit back... and wallow. |
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Californication The Complete First Season by David Bianculli Showtime's cable and satellite network reaches about 15 million subscribers, which means the vast majority of America hasn't seen its programming firsthand. That's why secondhand, which means DVD releases, is so meaningful -- and why this new DVD release of the first season of Californication is such good news. Californication stars David Duchovny as Hank Moody, a New York writer who encounters both success and failure after moving to Los Angeles -- success by having his novel sold and adapted into a hit movie, and failure by subsequently enduring writer's block and the failure of his long-term romantic relationship. Natascha McElhone co-stars as Karen, the woman who got away, young Madeleine Martin plays their daughter Becca, Madeline Zima plays Mia, a very young woman who seduces Hank with ulterior motives, and Evan Handler from Sex and the City plays Hank's literary agent and best friend. What's delightful about this series, which premiered last year, is how it manages to be so mature and so immature simultaneously. Hank, at the start of the series, is a self-loathing hedonist, going from bed to bed and woman to woman -- but he's capable of true love, because he adores his daughter (it's mutual), and wants nothing more than to get back with Karen. Problem is, she's engaged to another man. Over the course of the first season, Hank's path to redemption, and to rediscover his muse, takes him (and us) on a fairly wild ride. Situations that seem outlandish, presented only for shock value, are built upon so that their repercussions are fully explored. That includes romantic conquests, one-night stands, office flirtations and parental boundaries. Californication is one of the series, like Dexter, that has redefined and reinvigorated Showtime, propelling it out of HBO's shadow and making it a major creative force in its own right.
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Saturday Night Live The Complete Third Season by Diane Werts Buried with a donkey/He's my favorite honky/King Tut. We are twowildandcrazyguys! La Dolce Gilda. Yes, it was a very good year. Saturday Night Live in 1977-78 still had its original troupe intact (if you count Bill Murray replacing Chevy Chase) and still had a certifiably underground sensibility, before it morphed into the corporate "institution" of today. The counterculture kids were still running loose on live TV after the grownups went to bed. The Aykroyd/Belushi/Radner cast axis welcomed such varied guest hosts as Michael Palin, Madeline Kahn, Hugh Hefner and, oh my looking back now, O.J. Simpson. (Not to mention an elderly woman as "anyone can host" contest winner.) True rebellion was embodied by punker Elvis Costello, refusing to perform what he'd been told and defiantly changing song in mid-strum. Aykroyd and Belushi's soulful Blues Brothers broke a sweat in a burst of grassroots cool rather than corporate cashing-in. The show's sketch writers weren't so much trying to impact the zeitgeist then as to amuse themselves, in such delirious flights of fancy as Belushi's ubiquitous grunting samurai ("Samurai Night Fever") and Aykroyd's oily adult TV show exploitation-meister E. Buzz Miller. And The Coneheads? What were those writers smoking? (Tell-all books about those early years do tell.) There's more, much more -- Andy Kaufman, Mr. Bill, Meat Loaf, Ray Charles, Father Guido Sarducci, et al. But you don't wanna read about it here. Go. Watch. |
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Hiya Kids! A 50's Saturday Morning Box by Diane Werts How perverse WERE the 1950s? Get a load of these kiddie shows. Hosts whose attitudes would probably get them run through criminal databases today. Shrieking studio audiences of tots clearly mainlining sugar before the show. Unbridled, unapologetic product shillery. The innocent days? They're now, people! These folks were sick. This 4-disc set of 21 vintage children's series is an eye-opening -- and eye-rolling -- time trip back to decidedly un-PC days. And, too often, excruciatingly dull days. Don't get me wrong. I love Shout Factory for lovingly collecting and releasing these relics, which I would not expunge from my DVD library on pain of death. (Or having to watch The Bachelorette. Well, maybe, threatened with that.) In fact, any tubehead worth her or his salt is fairly required to watch all four discs, just to be completely educated on this dark yet strangely giddy era from the tube's early days. Beyond the expected titles -- Howdy Doody, Roy Rogers, Sky King and Kukla, Fran & Ollie -- the set collects some near-forgotten rarities that will in centuries to come be studied as artifacts of an utterly demented culture. It's now clear why '60s hippies did drugs. They were trying to recreate the cosmic visions of these delirious video transmissions from their '50s childhood. Take Andy's Gang, a bizarre amalgam -- nay, hallucinatory kaleidoscope -- of puppetry, book reading, studio audience hysteria and live-action tales filled with pale white folks playing "how" and "wampum" Indians. (We called Native Americans that then.) Host Andy Devine -- the squealy- voiced character actor from hundreds of westerns -- seems to be a sort of disembodied presence, almost a hologram floating in and out of the proceedings, sometimes dancing a jig while a talking orangutan plays harmonica. And then there's the frog-puppet command "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" Entirely inexplicable. Or The Magic Clown. This is a half-hour studio ad for Bonomo's Turkish Taffy, interrupted by snippets of magic tricks, as the child audience- in-a-box (each wearing a fez) contently munches in the background throughout, to the delight of dentists everywhere. Or The Pinky Lee Show. This organ-accompanied collection of vaudeville sketches featuring the title imp is actually pretty clever, as he interacts engagingly with the kid crowd amid parodies of current shows like Dragnet. Could've done without those blackface marionettes, though. Time for Beany may be the most inspired, sprung from the mind of Warner Bros. cartoonist Bob Clampett and featuring the vocal madness of humorist Stan Freberg and animation voice master Daws Butler. Though it's a simple puppets-before-painted-backdrop staging, its tale of globetrotting adventures stops in locations like Tim Buck Tooth. The MAD magazine crowd felt right at home. Oh, man, there's soooo much more, but who can handle more than three or four of these way-out phantasms at a time? Buy the set. Then ration yourself. We cannot be responsible for what happens to your brain on Hiya, Kids!! shows! |
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The Best of The Colbert Report Okay so maybe Stephen Colbert is not going to run for President after all. But at least we have this single-disc "Best of" sampler to imagine what might have been. The star of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report is in fine, funny form here, and the selections - culled from various episodes, cherrypicked to present concentrated doses of Colbert's cleverly skewed comedy and commentary. It's great to watch the opening of the very first show, for example, and realize in retrospect how fully realized his vision was from the start. Show #1 introduced the word "truthiness," which actually entered the vernacular as a result. And if nothing else, this disc includes some very memorable guest appearances, including a Ben & Jerry's ice-cream duel between Colbert and Willie Nelson (both of whom had flavors named after them), and a post-Emmys show in which Colbert is angry at Barry Manilow for "stealing" his award. Before those segments are over, Colbert sings with them both. The most outrageous guest on the package, though, is an unlikely one: Jane Fonda, featured in a pair of appearances. In the first, she's there, along with fellow feminist Gloria Steinem, to promote a radio network for women. In the second, she's there to promote her movie, Georgia Rules. In the first, Colbert undercuts the seriousness of the interview by moving it to a kitchen set, for a segment called "Cooking with Feminists." Wearing a "Kiss the Cook" apron, he chats to Fonda and Steinem while getting them to help him prepare an apple pie. Fonda, though, takes the upper hand, and flusters Colbert visibly, by taking the advice of his apron and kissing him, more than once. Then, on her second, solo appearance, Fonda takes charge again, by moving from her side of the table as Colbert begins the interview. She sits on his lap, plants a big kiss on him, and begins nuzzling his ear and talking about his soft lips. If that's not worth the price of a DVD, I don't know what is. |
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Seinfeld - The Complete Series If you've bought all the individual seasons of Seinfeld to this point, getting the stand-alone ninth-season set, to complete the collection, makes a lot more sense. What you'll be missing, basically: a beautiful, exclusive coffee-table Seinfeld book (it doesn't unfold into a coffee table, but it's still impressive), and the new jewel in the crown: a one-hour chat reuniting all four series stars with Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. A sampler of the conversation is included in the season nine set, but only Seinfeld - The Complete Series has the complete reunion chat. It's lots of fun, more like eavesdropping than watching an in-studio filmed conversation - and Jerry Seinfeld sets up the whole thing with a monologue, about Seinfeld, that proves the guy still knows how to write, and deliver, a monologue. What this set is about, really, however, is the show itself. All 180 episodes are here, from the Seinfeld Chronicles pilot (which began with Seinfeld's Jerry and Jason Alexander's George arguing about the proper placement of shirt buttons) to the hugely popular finale (which ended with Jerry and George arguing about... the proper placement of shirt buttons). No hugging, no learning, all the way to the end. Seinfeld is one of the best, most influential sitcoms ever made. It holds up extremely well to repeated viewings, and appeals to a wide range of viewers and ages. Home libraries have only so much room for mega-DVD sets such as this one, and price is at least as major a consideration - though hefty discounts are easy to find. But really: If you're only going to collect, or give as gifts, the very best, Seinfeld - The Complete Series belongs way up there on that list. |
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The Singing Detective The idea of "Classics to Consider" is to suggest TV shows that have been out on DVD for a while, but may have escaped your notice - and are perfect to seek out for those "nothing-to-watch" rainy days (or, if you don't have cable, summers). In that spirit, the very first, and best, such buried treasure to offer here is Dennis Potter's 1986 BBC masterpiece, The Singing Detective. Over the years, from the quickly failed Cop Rock to the instantly failed Viva Laughlin, TV shows have tried to emulate Potter's success at mounting a "drama with music," as he called it. None has come close, not even remotely. Potter came closest, with his own previous Pennies from Heaven miniseries. Please don't confuse the long-form TV versions of Pennies, or Detective, with their pallid big-screen counterparts. The movies don't work; the TV shows never miss. That's because, like novels, they take full advantage of the time and space given to explore themes and characters. But unlike a novel, The Singing Detective plays with image, music, and so many other tricks that it's a pure television creation. It weaves a handful of story threads into one twisting, turning, amazing arc, like a double-helix DNA strand, only tripled. Michael Gambon stars as pulp novelist and hospital patient Philip Marlow, and... well, see for yourself. Please. My enthusiasm for The Singing Detective is so great that I wrote the liner notes for the DVD - and no, I don't make any money off any sale, not unless you click and order it here. I just feel like everyone who cares about quality TV should see this masterpiece. Amazingly, it has never been televised in the United States on any national network - neither on PBS nor on cable - and was shown, back in 1987 and 1988 and repeated a few years later, only by public TV stations on an ad hoc mini-network. If you go to the FRESH AIR FAVORITES page, you can find and hear my original Fresh Air review of The Singing Detective. Or you can just trust me and order it now. As I wrote in the DVD liner notes: "If this is your first exposure to The Singing Detective, prepare to be blown away." |
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