..Gary Dretzka
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..Digital Dretzka Blog ..The MCN DVD Page

It’s been six years since Fox took the unprecedented step of releasing an entire season of a hit series into in a multi-disc DVD package, complete with making-of featurettes, interviews and fan-friendly trivia. The incredible success of The X-Files: The Complete First Season spawned an industry within an industry, and changed forever the way television studios did business and audiences accessed their products.

What began as a revenue trickle, on May 9, 2000, quickly swelled to a stream. Today, as we embark on another new programming season, that stream has begat a veritable deluge of TV-to-DVD packages. Critics wade into this swirling wash at their peril, because to adequately navigate even one tributary is to ignore the rising flood of divergent titles.

According to Kagan Research, as reported by the Digital Entertainment Group, TV-related products continue to be the fastest growing segment of the DVD marketplace, with about a quarter of all software sales. Kagan estimates that TV-to-DVD will generate $2.71 billion in worldwide revenues this years, but is likely to level off as consumers warm to electronic downloads. This is at the low end of studio expectations, which are closer to $4 billion in revenues in 2006.

Eventually, perhaps sooner than later, individual shows and series will become accessible on demand, via the Internet. Programs new and old will be served a la carte, for display on screens ranging in size and portability from minute to humungous. Or, so we’ve been told.

Factor time-shifting into the equation and a completely new paradigm will begin to emerge from the digital ooze. The hoopla that now surrounds the announcements of new fall schedules each May, at elaborately staged up-front presentations, will seem even more ridiculous than it already does. Why create a schedule in the first place, when the most demographically coveted customers will be ready, willing and able to mix and match shows to fit their own schedules?

TiVo, a vast improvement on existing VCR technology, was just the beginning of everything TV will be. Along with the Replay, it gave audiences the freedom to take the best of what television offers -- no matter one’s taste -- and discard the garbage. Not everyone takes full advantage of the technology, but even the most technophobic of viewers now is capable of zapping through one of those tortuous “Dr. Z” commercials with the push of a single button.

The dirty little secret of pod-casting is that its success is every bit as dependent on advertising as has broadcast television for more than 60 years. The same holds true for the websites sponsored by networks and their affiliates. Promotional value only goes so far in such labor-intensive endeavors.

More interesting, perhaps, are the options provided by broadband technology. For more than a dozen years, we’re been reporting on the potential benefits -- both commercially and educationally -- of providing multiple programming streams to consumers. High-definition significantly limits multicasting, but it opens the door to many other possibilities.

One of these has been signaled by the popularity of “uncut” and “uncensored” editions of movies and television series on DVD. E!’s virtual-polygamy series, The Girls Next Door offers an extreme example of how television executives could take advantage of multicasting. The episodes shown on the cable network allow Hef’s live-in girlfriends to do the “the full Monty,” but only as long as their nipples and neatly trimmed pubic hair remains pixilated (the same practice holds for the contestants on reality and dating shows, and the feuding hillbillies on Springer). PBS could stop insulting the intelligence of its adult viewers, by broadcasting versions of their shows minus the mindless bleeping of cuss words both strong and mild.

The DVD and pay-per-view incarnations of these shows, however, often eliminate the pixels and bleeped words, giving consumers the choice of filtered and unfiltered viewing. I wonder, how long will it take for the broadcast and cable networks to offer both “family” and “adult” versions of the same shows, simultaneously, via multicasting? Clearly, as the technologies that enable downloading and pod-casting advance, the advantage TV-to-DVD now has over broadcast could be completely eliminated (and the shows could still include commercials and programming plugs).

For all the hot-and-heavy hype accorded such shows as Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and The OC, none can hold a candle to such basic-plus cable programming as Footballers Wive$, Mile High, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, Reno 911, Show Me Yours and Lovespring International, all terrifically entertaining shows with plenty of naughty bits. Watching Sex and the City in its syndicated incarnation borders on the absurd. Why not use those federally mandated digital streams to give viewers the option of watching either the filtered PG- or unfiltered R-rated versions of the shows, even if it requires paying a premium to keep the FCC Taliban off our backs?

More likely, though, television executives won’t risk the aggravation. They’ll wait for someone else to figure out how to profit from the digital mandate and simply duplicate the strategy. Apparently, TV-to-DVD hasn’t derailed syndication sales of such popular off-network shows as Seinfeld, Friends and The Simpsons, even though fans can bypass commercial television by buying season-long packages.

Given the number of computer-phobic viewers still extant, however, these redundancies aren’t likely to disappear any time soon. It will be interesting to see how these digital dinosaurs come to grips with the pre-ordained death of analog broadcasting in 2009.

No matter … different strokes … etc. For the time being, at least, those of use who don’t mind being ridiculed for our obsessive television-viewing practices can derive a great deal of enjoyment from watching and re-watching episodes of shows that disappeared from view decades ago (for me, the arrival of Bilko and select segments of Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder’s talk shows came as a godsend). I can also catch up on such phenomenon as Lost and Survivor by watching an entire season back-to-back and commercial-free.

Ahead of the launch of the 2006-07 season, the inventory of TV-to-DVD titles has swelled beyond my ability to keep track of the titles. What follows is a rundown of just some of the TV-to-DVD packages sent to me for review. I could lie, by saying I watched everything, but basic math -- there still are only 24 hours in a day, I imagine -- suggests otherwise.

If I so choose, however, I could make the time and park myself on the couch and watch highlights from a dozen shows that completely slipped my attention when they were launched. The sets include Prison Break: Season One Invasion: The Complete Series, Epitafios: The Complete First Season, The Tick Vs. Season One, Beautiful People: The Complete First Season, Family: The Complete First and Second Seasons. Supernatural: The Complete First Season, The Bill Cosby Show: Season One and, from Disney, Darkwing Duck, Volume 1 and TaleSpin, Volume. 1. If any struck my fancy, I could go back and take a closer look.

On the other hand, if Prison Break or Lost didn’t warrant TiVo-ing the first and second time around, why bother? At least there was an excuse for not recording “Invasion,” in that I was already TiVo-ing Law & Order and CSI: New York, and the show disappeared quickly after that. Unlike the series represented in Rome: The Complete First Season, Epitafios might have been the least-hyped series in the history of HBO. Perhaps, that’s because the grisly thriller was from Argentina and in Spanish.

For those without cable, HBO’s Emmy juggernaut Elizabeth I -- starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons -- has just become available on DVD, as well. So has its likely nearest competitor, Mrs. Harris. starring Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley. Also from HBO is Jon Alpert‘s Emmy-winning documentary, Baghdad ER. It’s only taken two months for AMC’s original Western, Broken Trail, -- with multiple Emmy-nominee Robert Duvall, Thomas Haden Church and Gwendoline Yeo -- to make the leap from TV to DVD. Past Emmy-winner Ted Danson and nominee Mary Steenburgen appear in the supernatural thriller, Talking to Heaven, which aired on CBS in 2002 as Living With the Dead.

The debut DVD and CD of Russell Peters: Outsourced arrived just days after it was shown on Comedy Central … another trend in marketing concert and performance videos. The discs add 30 minutes of unaired footage, as well as extras.

It would take more space than is available here to fully describe all of the other new TV-to-DVD titles. Here’s a sampling, however: Grey's Anatomy: Season Two, or, to be more precise, “Season 1½,” as it was given a midseason tryout after Desperate Housewives; Commander in Chief: The Inaugural Edition, Part 2, which represents Episodes 11-18 of the show that took a ratings nosedive after an ill-timed hiatus; the clever, but under-seen, Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season; the non-segregationist. Survivor Palau: The Complete Season; Lost : The Complete Second Season and ABC‘s other sophomore smash, Desperate Housewives: The Complete Second Season; and the newly martyred Fox sitcom, Arrested Development: Season 3.

Nip/Tuck: The Complete Third Season, The Wire: The Complete Third Season, Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Fifth Season and Oz: The Complete Sixth Season represent cable at its most unpredictable and edgy. Long-running sitcom packages include, Full House: The Complete Fourth Season, Scrubs: The Complete Fourth Season, Hogan's Heroes: The Complete Fourth Season, The Flintstones: The Complete Sixth Season, The Andy Griffith Show: The Complete Seventh Season and South Park: The Complete Eighth Season. Also new are Stargate SG-1: Season 9 Boxed Set and Michael Moore's Best of The Awful Truth.

Based solely on the hype surrounding The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of the Christ, I'd be willing to bet that somewhere in the deep recesses of a Hollywood lies a script for a weekly drama series based on Jesus' pal and confidante, Mary Magdalene. Dan Burstein's Secrets of Mary Magdalene was a more serious endeavor, but the reformed bad girl has since become a regular on history-based cable channels. This set is comprised of two programs, Secrets of Mary Magdalene and A Mary Magdalene Roundtable: The Experts Speak, as well as bonus featurettes on her possible founding role in early Christianity, her depiction in renaissance art, the early Gnostic view of Adam and Eve and the Song of Songs.

It is among the thousands of titles of non-fiction made-for-TV programs that find their way into the marketplace annually. Add to that number the many fine DVD sets coming our way from foreign and Canadian outlets, and there's absolutely no reason to leave the living room, anymore.

September 12, 2006

- Gary Dretzka

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