Borgen: Season One (2010/MHz DVD Set)/The Client List: The Complete First Season (2012/Sony DVDs)/House Of Cards Trilogy (Original U.K.
Series/1990 – 1995/BBC Blu-rays)/Murdoch
Mysteries: Season Five (2012/Acorn Blu-rays)/Naked City: 20 Star-Filled Episodes (1958 – 1963/Image DVDs)/Thorne: Sleepyhead/Scaredycat
(2010/Encore DVDs)
Picture: DVDs:
C+/Blu-rays: B- Sound: C+/C+/B-/C+/C+/B- Extras: C-/C/C+/C+/D/C- Episodes: B-/C/B-/C/B/B-
Now for a
variety of recent TV releases…
The least
heard of title here is Borgen: Season
One (2010) produced in Denmark
and as good as anything on the list.
Running ten hours-long shows, the first three set up the characters and
the tale of the country’s first female prime minister played by Sidse Babett
Knudsen. Then we start to learn more
about the world around them and that includes more characters including a sexy,
smart reporter (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) who was involved with the PM’s
assistant (Johan Philip Asbaek) until his personal issues split them up. He still cannot let go and old issues are
coming back to haunt him.
On the
side include the politics of getting a coalition together in a
Unitary/Parliamentary Democracy, is the CIA up to no good in the country and
are there payoffs and spying going on illegally? It does not take long to get adjusted to this
all and just gets better with each episode, which is why it is understandably a
hit three seasons long and counting. These
are some solid actors as well and that all makes this a show worth going out of
your way for. Nice it was not so
predictable either, plus you would only see a show this bold on cable/satellite
TV in the U.S.,
which is another reason to recommend it.
Trailers
for other MHz Home Video DVDs are the only extras, including for the original
version of Wallander.
Much more
predictable, lite and silly is the lame new Jennifer Love Hewitt show, The Client List: The Complete First Season
(2012), in which the married mom gets so sick of her family’s financial issues
that she starts working at a massage parlor!
Too bad it is a safe, corny TV massage parlor, so none of the so called
adults are sexual, have much sex or act like adults. A moderate hit, Cybill Shepherd’s turn as her
mom is a plus for the show, but this is formulaic to the point that Lifetime
picked it up, so that should tell you about its massive predictability.
We get
all ten repetitive episodes on 3 DVDs and unless you really, really, really
like Hewitt, skip it. Outtakes and
Deleted Scenes are the only extras.
The new
Kevin Spacey House Of Cards series
is a hit, but the show was originally a hit in the 1990s for the BBC in the U.K.
culminating into three mini-series. The House Of Cards Trilogy (1990 – 1995)
has been issued by the BBC as a Blu-ray set, a pleasant surprise but it was all
shot on film at the time. Made of 4
episodes each, we get House of Cards
(1990), To Play The King (1993) and The Final Cut (1995) in a fictional
imagining of what would happen when Margaret Thatcher finally stepped down and
a new leader was chosen. She did leave
around the time of the first series, helping its commercial fortunes, but not
the country that she really messed up with her Neo-Conservative policies.
Ian
Richardson is Francis Urquhart, who becomes the next PM and not only does it by
manipulative means; he constantly breaks the fourth wall to talk to the viewer
about what is going on. I found that
device wore thin despite the great actor being so good, but I also found the
whole Trilogy problematic as if I would be shocked by anything after Thatcher’s reign.
The great Andrew Davies adapted from Michael Dobbs’ novel and it became
one of the few British TV events I can recall from its decade.
BBC Video
was wise to issue a trilogy set because the show should be seen from the start
and this packaging encourages that. You
better have some patience and even be ready to look up Britishisms and history
to get the full understanding of events, but it is worth the effort and will
make for interesting comparisons
Extras include
audio commentary tracks on the first episode of each mini-series, a 9-minutes
on-camera interview with Writer Davies and 1996 51-minutes-long documentary Westminster: Behind Closed Doors ion
which we are given a tour of the Parliament building by politician Tony Benn.
Murdoch Mysteries: Season Five (2012) has the 100+ year old set
murder series going from its usual episodic style to trying to have the lead
title character (Yannick Bisson) in trouble with the law and possibly leaving
the team, but that only last so long as this 13-episode set has the gang
solving more historical (and almost hysterical) cases that cross paths with
real history, though they have a slight line between their fiction and that
reality that keeps the show going.
However,
there is a sense that the detour of the lead in trouble has robbed the show of
some of its energy and though I don’t love the show, can feel a difference
between this and the early seasons. The
weekly TV grind is finally starting to take hold of the show, so we’ll see
where that takes it in future seasons.
If you are interested in the show, start at the beginning and all five
seasons are on Blu-ray, all reviewed elsewhere on this site.
A
behind-the-scenes photo gallery, 5-minutes-long season overview, 2 minutes of
costumes, 6 minutes of sound bites and featurettes on three of the episodes are
the extras.
The Naked City: 20 Star-Filled
Episodes (1958 –
1963) samples some fine episodes of the hit Screen Gems police drama that has
not been seen enough in recent years, but was a quality show and it deserves to
be remembered better than it has been.
The show began as an hour-long series with one set of detectives and
concluded as a half-hour show with new leads including a young James Franciscus
before a nice run of big screen stardom, though a few actors lasted the whole
series. The show was also shot in New York City at the sadly
defunct Biograph Studios where the hit TV sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? (also reviewed on this site) was also
produced.
The
episodes and their future big name guest stars are as follows:
Sweet Prince Of Delancey Street (1961) with Dustin Hoffman and
Jan Miner
Portrait Of A Painter (1862) with William Shatner,
Theodore Bikel, Barry Morse and Lou Antonio
The Night The Saints Lost Their
Halos (1952) with
Peter Fonda, Martin Sheen and Jo Van Fleet
The One Marked Hot Gives Cold (1962) with Robert Duvall &
Stuart Damon
Down The Long Night (1960) with Leslie Nielsen,
Nehemiah Persoff & Geraldine Brooks
To Walk In Silence (1960) with Claude Rains and
Telly Savalas
Shoes For Vinnie Winford (1961) with Dennis Hopper in a
performance that may have inspired part of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (see the Blu-ray elsewhere on this site)
Tombstone For A Derelict (1861) with Robert Redford as a
Nazi Gang Leader!!!
Alive & Still A Second
Lieutenant (1963)
with Jon Voight and Robert Sterling
A Hole In The City (1961) with Robert Duvall and
Sylvia Sydney
Bullets Cost Too Much (1961) with James Caan, Bruce
Dern, Jean Stapleton and Dick York
Prime Of Life (1963) with Gene Hackman &
Barnard Hughes
Robin Hood & Clarence Darrow
They Went Out with the Bow & Arrow (1963) with Christopher Walken, Eddie Albert, Michael
Strong and Sylvia Miles
Lady Bug, Lady Bug (1958) with Peter Falk
One Of The Most Important Men In The
Whole World (1962)
with Richard Conte, Barnard Hughes, Eugene Roche and Jennifer Billingsley
Line Of Duty (1958) with Diane Ladd
Spectre Of The Rose Street Gang (1962) with Carroll O’Connor,
Jack Warden and Roger C. Carmel
The Multiplicity Of Herbert Konish (1962) with Jean Stapleton, David
Wayne and Nancy Marchand
The Pedigree Sheet (1950) with Suzanne Pleshette,
Eric Portman, Murray Hamilton, Al Lewis and Roger C. Carmel
and The Tragic Success Of Alfred Tiloff (1961)
with Jack Klugman, Jan Sterling and Ruth White
There are
no extras, but this is a great introductory set to the show and is highly
recommended.
Finally
we have David Morrissey as Detective Tom Thorne in two three-episode
mysteries. Thorne: Sleepyhead/Scaredycat (2010) offers intelligently written
characters, well thought out situations and a show that is not just another
police procedural, but actually has good casting, convincing set-ups and some
real edge missing from most of its U.S.
and U.K.
counterparts. The first story is about a
medical criminal abducting and experimenting with women in bizarre ways, while
the second tale has a psychopath on the loose who may have an equally ill
friend or two.
These are not for those who cannot handle the rawness of the carnage, which a
show like CSI clinicizes to make it
more palatable. Instead, this show is on
the raw side and Morrissey has found one of his best roles ever. Sandra Oh, Natascha McElhone Aidan Gillen and
Eddie Marsan are among the great supporting players. I liked the first case more than the second,
but the show is more successful than most like it in recent years, so it too is
worth going out of your way for.
A preview
is the only extras.
The 1080p
1.33 X 1 digital High Definition image quality on the three series on Cards and 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High
Definition image transfers on Murdoch
are the visual champs as expected with Cards
having slight inconsistencies but nicely shot on film otherwise, while Murdoch is a recent HD production with
motion blur and minor detail issues.
Neither could or would look as consistently good on DVD.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.20 X 1 RED One HD-shot image on Borgen, anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on List and Thorne and black and white 1.33 X 1 image on all 20 35mm-shot Naked City
episodes are on par with each other. The
new shows are all HD shoots with their share of motion blur, slight downstyling
and other flaws, while Naked City
can show its age and the prints have some wear, plus a few look
second-generation. However, they look
really good overall.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Mono lossless mix on Cards is one sonic champion with warm sound reproduction, but the
surprise is that its match happens to be the aggressive, well-mixed lossy Dolby
Digital 5.1 mix on Thorne which is
the big sonic surprise among the six releases here. Well recorded as well, I
wished it were lossless. I bet the
soundfield would be more consistent that way to.
The lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 on List, lossy
Dolby Digital 2.0 Danish Stereo on Borgen,
lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on the Murdoch
Blu-ray and lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Naked City are right behind them with List weaker and more towards the front and center channels than it
should be, Borgen and Murdoch solid performers with no
palpable surrounds and Naked City
not bad for its age, professionally recorded and rendered well for its time.
- Nicholas Sheffo
