The world's a scary place these days, so why go there at all? Just stay at home, fire up your DVD player, and watch royals and vampires and Cylons (oh, my!) get hot and heavy. Or watch them at work -- hey, they're gonna lay you off anyway; might as well have some fun before you go! (And since it's time to stretch your dollars, don't pay the list price -- you can almost always save big on Amazon and its online rival sites.)

The Tudors: The Complete First Season ($42.99) outraged some history profs and buffs by stressing the violent sexiness of Henry VIII in his buff youth (when he looked less like Charles Laughton and more like Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a bit at the expense of strict historical accuracy. But man, does the show look glossy -- the designer is up for a big award. The just-released The Tudors: The Complete Second Season ($49.98) shifts the tone: still sexy, as Anne heads inexorably towards headlessness, but more historical, so you don't have to watch it and then do penance by watching A Man for All Seasons. To make you feel less guilty, the author Anne Rice logged onto Amazon to endorse the show's playing fast and loose with actual events, sexing them up. Gee, why ever would Anne do such a thing?

Maybe it was to goose The Tudors's sales and dampen enthusiasm for its rival this week, Anne's own concupiscent-parasite series True Blood: The Complete First Season ($40.99). While I deplore Anna Paquin's Golden Globe win as Best Actress for her sloppy, colored-outside-the-lines performance as oft-sucked heroine Sookie Stackhouse -- she's the worst thing about the show -- I confirm that it's as addictive as the Japanese blood substitute invented to give vampires an orgasmic alternative to human blood (the True Blood of the title). Love that swamp-rock theme song too, "I Wanna Do Bad Things to You." Blessedly, the HBO adaptation broadens the focus from Sookie's mind-reading head to a whole passel of fascinating fellow swamp-dwellers and vampire-haters and lovers. One small cavil: Compared to other Alan Ball shows like Six Feet Under, it's a little stringy with the pace of plot development. That hot weather makes it sluggish sometimes.

You sure can't say that about Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.0 ($49.98). The changes come hard and fast as the Cylon skin-job robots confront humanity's survivors and each other. Some shows jump the shark; this one completely transcends the shark -- it keeps getting better, smarter, and more disconcertingly relevant to the real Earth. 24 is relevant only if you're a diehard Wall Street Journal editorialist, living in ideological cloudcuckooland. The real commentary on our times is Battlestar Galactica. Get ready for the second half of the fourth season with the first, very full half, complete with the full-length Razor movie.

The rest of the new year's DVD TV shows are smaller fry. The much-hyped Secret Diary of a Call Girl: Season One ($29.98) is a monotonously monologuizing snore, despite Billie Piper's abundant charms. Little Britain USA ($29.98) seems a contradiction in terms -- I prefer the all-Brit original, though I'm told I'm wrong, and un-American. To prove my patriotism, let me endorse the newly released Dallas: The Complete Tenth Season ($39.98), an all-American celebration of capitalism at its vicious '80s best, back when Texas did not spell economic disaster for all. It's one of the best seasons of one of the best shows ever. J.R., I salute you! Let somebody else shoot you.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us