Tim Appelo,
Dec 23, 2008
Don't give me any of your guff, people! This is the "Top Ten List of TV on DVD" for the year, and you're going to buy each and every blessed one! To show I've got a heart, let me hip you to a secret: you can save big by not paying the suggested retail price.
There are lots of sites, and I have no reason to recommend my alma mater, Amazon.com, although I regularly see incredible sales there, and you probably will too. (Bonus fun fact about Amazon, to prove I'm not a corporate shill: when my office mate James Marcus, author of the best book about Amazon, Amazonia, was drinking with Jeff Bezos and the founding staffers, they got to talking about who they'd sleep with if they absolutely had to sleep with a member of the same sex. Bezos said, "Indiana Jones." I picture a giant rock with Jeff's bald head, laughing Jeff's incredible whooping laugh, rolling down the hill with Indy in terrified retreat.)
So anyway, here they are in order, the best TV DVDs of 2008:
1. The Wire: The Complete Series ($249.99)
The show that makes all the other shows look stupid, including the genius ones. Everything you need to know about what went wrong with America lately is in this Dickensian epic about the inner-city Baltimore drug trade and the sensitive spiderweb of corruption around it. You need to watch it on DVD, not on TV, not just for the extras, but for the subtitles -- the dialogue is so authentic (including at least one actual inner-city denizen) and the plots so swift and Byzantine that without the subtitles, you will get lost on a hairpin turn several times per episode. And yes, it's worth watching it all again.
2. The Shield, Seasons 1-6 (Season 6, $59.95, previous seasons mostly $49.95)
OK, it's another drama about drugs and crooked cops. Can I help it if we live in a crooked society obsessed with easy money and cheap thrills and betrayal? In some ways, Vic Mackey is even more au courant than The Wire guys. Originally inspired by the LA cops who went undercover and lost their souls, it wound up paralleling our society when we went after Islamist gangsters. The moral drama is riveting, and the physical thrills are more kinetic than The Wire.
3. 30 Rock, Season 2 ($39.98)
Who won the election? Clearly, Tina Fey. Her realer-than-real impersonation of Sarah Palin, the bridge to political nowhere from MILF Island, helped set up the back-from-the-verge-of-disaster triumph of her sitcom, which uses SNL as a springboard to the empyrean where Mary Tyler Moore dwells in eternal glory. "I feel like this is going to be my year," Tina's semi-autobiographical character says at the start of the first episode. Good call!.
4. John Adams ($59.99)
Of all the Founding Fathers, Adams is arguably the biggest loser -- overshadowed by the rest, sidelined by time, increasingly (and entertainingly and wittily) embittered as he got old and crotchety. How inspired to have Paul Giamatti play him! And Laura Linney as his brainy, brave missus. It's great to see him team up and mentally duel with Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane), about whom he might have said what Paul McCartney did when he heard John Lennon was shot: "He was a maneuvering swine, but so was I." This miniseries is HBO at its most imaginative. Plus, it makes you smarter. Also, consider the quadruple Emmy-winning 1976 The Adams Chronicles ($59.95).
5. The Sopranos: The Complete Series ($399.98)
With 86 episodes, three and a half hours of extras you've never seen, badda-bing, whaddaya want? But I'll tell you what: the superior artwork is The Sopranos: The Complete First Season ($59.98), which tells the saga of Tony Soprano's tussle with the biggest villain of his life, his mom (the late Nancy Marchand). It has a sense of completion that the bizarrely abrupt ending of the last episode of the series violently lacks.
6. Mad Men, Season 1 ($49.98)
The most influential show of the year, a must-see -- though you also must admit it's perversely stingy with exposition, it omits the very essence of the '60s, the sense of giddy optimism and limitless possibilities, and the hero's wife is one weird, only half-successful character, even more opaque than her husband. Still, when this show scores, it soars like no other. The last episode of the season alone is enough to make MM immortal.
7. Entourage: The Complete Fourth Season ($39.98)
Granted, the Pablo Escobar biopic kind of took over the season and skewed the ensemble drama that is the whole point of the show. But it remains the best skewering of Hollywood ever seen on TV, truer than true, and much more heartwarming than the real thing. Mad Men should get an energy transfusion from these dudes, and soon.
8. Sense and Sensibility/Persuasion/Miss Austen Regrets Collector's Set ($49.98)
If you have any sense or sensibility, this amazing Jane Austen set will persuade you. It boasts the three-part BBC miniseries that's every bit as good (and in some ways better than) the Oscar-winning film version, the only slightly less brilliant BBC Persuasion, and the excellent mini-biopic Miss Austen Regrets, starring Olivia Williams and Greta Scacchi.
9. Generation Kill ($59.99)
As a drama, this seven-part HBO show is uneven in the extreme -- but that's because it's based very closely on the actual life-and-death adventures of a Marine battalion at the very spear-point of the invasion of Iraq, witnessed by an embedded (nearly beheaded) Rolling Stone reporter. It captures the fog of war and the hearts and minds of young men trying to save your life. Find out about your tax dollars at work, and why it didn't work.
10. Route 66: The Complete Second Season ($49.98)
Why watch a Mad Men-era show about two guys driving aimlessly cross-country and encountering guest stars like Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, and Tuesday Weld? Because it's truer to the real '60s than Mad Men, inspired by Kerouac, and a bracing stab from the past. And the second season looks better than the first.
