Complete Bastards

For a long while it has become increasingly obvious that television dramas are best watched from a DVD boxset. That way the narrative isn’t interrupted by commercial breaks for car insurance, hair care products and celebrities bigging up supermarkets. It also means as a viewer you aren’t at the mercy of channel schedulers who either stick the programme into an inconveniently late time slot or disappear it all together.

Of course the drawback is that companies putting out the various shows on DVD aren’t simply doing it just for our benefit. If they don’t sell enough units to receive a decent return, the releases are liable to grind to a halt. Hill Street Blues hasn’t got beyond the second season, Fox have halted NYPD Blue in its tracks at season four, and it doesn’t look like St Elsewhere is going to get beyond its first year, which is a shame.

Still, there’s always a glimmer of hope. Sony left a whole three year gap between the second and third years of The Shield, then hurriedly spat out the further seasons in a bid to catch up. But for fans who doggedly buy a show on DVD, season by season until the very end, it’s got to be particularly galling when the company releasing them then brings out a special complete series set that includes additional extras beyond what was originally offered.

For fans of Seinfeld, Sony again seriously rubbed their noses it in by putting out a 33-disc Complete Collection, that a 226-page coffee table book, right on the back of season nine’s release. Meanwhile Warner Home Video knocked out The Complete West Wing, which contained the Region 1 extras that hadn’t been made available in the individual UK boxsets.


With Christmas soon to be looming on the horizon, Warner are poised to release The Sopranos – Deluxe Edition. Along with all 86 episodes of David Chase’s New Jersey mob family drama, deleted scenes and commentaries, the set includes Alec Baldwin interviewing Chase, cast and crew discussing the series finale over two sit-down dinners, and numerous spoofs and parodies.

It also features “The Whacked Sopranos” panel discussion from March 2007. Held at New York’s Museum of Television and Radio, now renamed The Paley Center for Media, the special event saw actors Steve Buscemi, Drea de Matteo, Vincent Pastore, David Proval and Annabella Sciorra take to the stage to discuss their character’s untimely, and usually bloody, demise.

The previously released individual seasons of The Sopranos weren’t exactly cheap. So this new arrival, along with Deadwood: The Complete Series, which is coming out on Region 1 DVD in December and trumpeting a bonus disc of all new material, has really got to stick in the craw of anybody who has already forked out for them.

It’s bad enough that various movies are re-released on Special Edition or Definitive Edition discs, but if companies like Warner and Sony are going to take up this practise of bringing out better packaged editions of particular television dramas long after their initial costly release, what are we expected to do? Ignoring the original releases and waiting to see what eventually comes out seems to be a plan.

But if nobody takes any interest to begin with the company may think there simply isn’t an audience out there. While we twiddle our thumbs in anticipation, they cut their losses by simply knocking it on the head and then nobody gets to see it. There are times when capitalism really sucks.