GALACTICA!! GILMORE!! NEWHART!! UNIT!! SEINFELD!! Herc's Super-Exciting Season-Box DVD Vault!!

I am – Hercules!!

“Battlestar Galactica” was the best show of 2005 and it may yet turn out to be the best of 2006. Amy Sherman-Palladino references to it in “Gilmore Girls” dialogue. In the third-season opener of “Veronica Mars,” the title character meets a “Galactica” fan who explains to her what “frak” means, and Veronica now uses “frak” whenever she means “fuck.” That’s pretty cool. The new set is a confusing set! It’s titled Battlestar Galactica 2.5, but episode 2.5 isn’t on it. 2.5 is on the “2.0” set. Episodes 2.10-2.20 are on the 2.5 set, which picks up with the arrival of the long-thought-destroyed Pegasus and ends a year later with Galactica and Pegasus fleeing New Caprica with only a small percentage of the 12 colonies’ survivors. The new set contains all the never-televised deleted scenes and podcast commentaries, plus a video blog by David Eick, the guy who hired Ron Moore to revive “Galactica.” But the biggest extra is probably the expanded version of 2.10, “Pegasus.”

It’s hard to know what Fox Home Entertainent was thinking when it engineered the packaging for The Bob Newhart Show: The Complete Fourth Season, which just kind of screams, “DON’T BUY ME!!!” But go ahead and buy it. Hideous cover art notwithstanding, the Newhart show was always a model of comedic understatement, and season four was no exception. Hapless houseguest Cliff “The Peeper” Murdock (Tom Poston) opens and closes the season with his first two appearances. Bob has to intervene when Howard has difficulty proposing to Bob’s sister. A patient dies right after Bob, under pressure, forces him out of his therapy group. Carol proves disruptive to a workshop for the overweight. Carol marries a man 12 hours after she meets him on a blind date. Bob and Emily play host to a French psychologist. Bob’s college mentor informs Bob that psychology is nonsense. Bob is ambused on a talk show. Bob joins the firm of a “swinging psychologist.” Emily heads to a family reunion, leaving Bob to spend Thanksgiving with his buddies. Bob’s mother becomes a houseguest. Bob’s sister does a story on Bob and his fellow doctors. Emily is unexpectedly promoted to vice principal. Bob has his tonsils out. Bob enters into a patient’s real-estate venture. Howard’s brother – Warden Gordon Borden – takes an interest in Howard’s girlfriend. Jerry’s globe-trotting ex drops in with a proposal of marriage. A basketball superstar becomes Bob’s patient. Carol decides to become a psychologist. Bob gets sued. And a beauty queen (Brooke Adams) babysits Howard’s son.

Gilmore Girls: The Complete Sixth Season was the last to be overseen by comedy genius Amy Sherman-Palladino, and will almost certainly be the last season of the show a lot of people – including me - will want to buy. It begins with Luke accepting Lorelai’s proposal and with Rory still in estranged dropout mode. It ends with Logan Huntzberger moving to London and Lorelai boning Rory’s dad. Luke discovers he has a daughter. Rory becomes editor of the Yale Daily News. In between there’s an amazing scene in which Richard Gilmore comes to the realization that he may have needlessly brought his family irreparable harm. It ends not the way most fans would have preferred, but was a great season nonetheless.

If I were to have imagined three years ago what the great and prolific playwright-filmmaker David Mamet’s first TV show would look like, I’m pretty sure I’d have envisioned something rather different than The Unit. I haven’t yet had a chance to look at the entire first season, but I believe I will get around to it. For those unfamiliar, it’s about the strange lives of the civilian wives of military men assigned to incredibly hazardous top-secret anti-terrorist deployments. Not only does the show boast the peerless Mamet (“The Untouchables,” “Heist,” “Spartan,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Homicide,” “The Spanish Prisoner,” “The Verdict,” “House of Games,” etc. etc. etc.), it has thespianic god Dennis Haysbert (bat-wielding political powerhouse David Palmer on “24”), who really frankly should have made the leap to snagging some of those Samuel L. Jackson movie roles at this point. Of the first 13 episodes, Mamet himself scripted the first, second and sixth. Sister and “Law & Order” vet Lynn Mamet worked on the fifth, eighth and 13th. “Shield” mastermind Shawn Ryan, credited as co-creator of “The Unit,” wound up getting a (shared) teleplay credit on only one first-season episode, the fourth. Herc’s Popular Pricing Pantry The march of the supercheap series sets continues. The big news is the “Twilight Zone” series set is all kinds of back after a long pre-release layoff. The “M*A*S*H” set, which actually contained the entire Robert Altman movie as a bonus feature, has disappeared. I’m leaving the link up, though, because you never know when it’s going to reappear …