Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a pair of Season One box sets to review! Holy Crap, let’s get started!
I have always been a Johnny-Come-Lately with TV shows. I was a real TV snob for a long while, but you can’t deny that there are some incredible shows on television right now that push the boundaries more constantly and more intelligently than a lot of film. It also doesn’t help that technology and money have advanced enough to make these shows look cinematic.
I’m getting better about catching up to TV. With 24 I bought the first four seasons and watched them over the course of about 2 months. Then I kept regular for Season 5, my DVR saving me when I wasn’t there to catch it live.
With LOST I was only 6 episodes behind when I caught re-runs of earlier episodes and stayed regular ever since, even through the “treading water” rough patch we’ll call Season 2.
HEROES took me about 9 episodes before I gave in and caught up thanks to the internets. Did you know you could watch all the episodes for free on the NBC website? I still have yet to download video from iTunes. I’m sure I’ll give in one of these days.
But I’m growing long-winded already. Let’s nip this in the bud. 30 ROCK. I have many friends who are into the show and I’ve always meant to catch it, but the season ended before I could play catch-up like I did with LOST and HEROES.
Thankfully I got a review copy of the first season in the mail.
I love you, Tina Fey.
I had to say it. Sure, you can have a crush on her from SNL, but any geek guy that doesn’t fall in love with Tina Fey after completing Season One of 30 Rock is more Sulu than Kirk if you catch my drift.
To be perfectly honest, it took me about 4 or 5 episodes to really get into 30 ROCK. I liked it, but it was safer than I expected, more typically prime time comedy. Maybe shows like SOUTH PARK have spoiled me a bit with stuff like Chef’s notorious final episode or having a junkie towel for a character, but it took me a couple episodes of getting to know Liz Lemon (Fey) and her colleagues at an SNL-ish sketch show before I was hooked.
One of the things I had heard about the show was just how great Alec Baldwin was as Jack Donaghy, the new boss. At the beginning of the season I was worried they were going to be playing him as clueless, a kind of riff on the Office boss, but it became clearer and clearer as the episodes progressed that Donaghy knew what was going on.
I love you, Alec Baldwin.
And I’m not ashamed to say it. He is absolutely amazing on this show and if everybody else was lame, but he was the same the show would still be worth watching.
My favorite episode of the season has to be the Paul Reubens cameo. You have Baldwin and Fey going to a birthday dinner for some Austrian royalty, played by Reubens and it was so damn insane and off-the-wall that I gut-laughed. Reubens in the man.
And not only that, but it’s this episode that introduces us to Isebella Rossellini, playing Baldwin’s soon to be ex. There’s a cat-fight. A cat-fight and Paul Reubens with fake puppet legs and a child’s ivory hand? What more can you expect out of network television?
The rest of the cast all turn in great comedic work as well. From Judah Friedlander and Keith Powell as members of the writing staff to Jane Krakowski (over-sexed and little dumb star of the show) to Tracy Morgan (the replacement “star” of the show) to Rachel Dratch (who is the “Oh My God, You Killed Kenny!” of the season, appearing in every episode as a different character… my favorite by far is “the Blue Dude”) and finally… to Jack McBrayer.
I love you, Jack McBrayer.
If there’s a break-out role on the show it’s McBrayer’s Kenneth Parcell, the lovable NBC page who has a Mormon-like kindness and positive outlook on the world. He’s unfailingly happy.
Although the two characters share nothing in common, I couldn’t help but think of Mackenzie Crook as Gareth from the original UK Office while watching McBrayer work. It was that same sense that every single time you saw this guy pop up something really damn funny was going to happen that is at once totally in character, but also a different twist on what you’d expect.
The discs aren’t overloaded with extras, but there are a fair amount of goodies for ya’.
On the third and last disc you get 5 commentary tracks on 5 different episodes, you get a gag reel that played at the wrap party, you get deleted scenes, a series of behind the scenes shot by various cast members (mostly Judah Friedlander), “An Evening With Kenneth” and Makin’ It Happen.
Makin’ It Happen is a gag in the show about a successful 10 second online TV sitcom. In the show we only see one, but there are 3 on here. It’s always one camera and a couple on a coach. My favorite has the husband opening the door and bringing in a black kid. “Hey honey! Look who I adopted!” The wife rolls her eyes. “Oh, great!” and the kid looks at the camera with a big smile and says, “Catch phrase!”
An Evening with Kenneth is Jack McBrayer, in character, hosting his own show with a crappy video camera set up at his desk and he gets the people around him from the show to be his guests. So, all of it is in character. You get Krakowski, Jordan and Friedlander doing some funny stuff and a weird tangent about kittens.
The Gag Reel… perfect. I love these things so much. And yes, Ms. Fey… I even love your “weird eye.”
The commentaries.
TRACY DOES CONAN – Commentary by Tracy Morgan.
Tracy Morgan is surprisingly frank in this commentary, talking about how he didn’t really base Tracy Jordan off of Martin Lawrence (the two have similar moments involving running down a street in their skivvies) or himself, really. He talks about how he was in a low place before he got this show, with DUIs and little quality work. I wasn’t expecting such frank and open insight. Or maybe he was just fucking with me. I don’t know.
BLACK TIE – Commentary by Tina Fey
This is the favorite episode I was talking about earlier with Paul Reubens. Fey gives the most insightful commentary of the batch given that she’s not only the star of the show, but one of the creators as well. The only drawback is how much she brings up her husband. I agree, his musical work on the show is great, but you don’t need to shatter my dreams over and over again!
HARD BALL – Commentary by Lorne & Henry Michaels
This one is actually intro’d by Fey and you’ll understand why when you listen to it. It’s SNL honcho (and show exec. Producer) Lorne Michaels and his kid, Henry, who was instrumental in getting this show going. They pretty much just watch the show, featuring Krakowski’s character confusing Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden on Hard Ball, and say the occasional “She’s so good in this.” “Yeah…” “He’s good in this.” “This is funny.” That’s about it.
FIREWORKS – Commentary by Jack McBrayer
This is another great episode featuring a guest appearance by Will Arnet and a short, short bathrobe. It really is a great pick for a commentary by McBrayer because he owns this episode. Arnett is a colleague/competitor of Baldwin’s character and it turns out Arnett wants to fuck Kenneth, so Baldwin sends him in to seduce his enemy.
McBrayer’s commentary was light and fun. He got some laughs out of me in the 23-ish minutes he had to talk.
HIATUS – Commentary by Alec Baldwin
This is the final episode of the season and Baldwin has a ton to talk about. He sounds so happy to be a part of this show… and he talks a lot about who is really horny in the cast. Gotta love the Baldwin.
So, yeah. This box set comes out tomorrow. If you’re a fan of the show you were probably going to add it to the shelf anyway, but if you were on the fence the discs won’t blow you away with extra features, but you’ll get a decent amount of goodies.
If you haven’t seen the show, you like comedy and you have an extra $30 or so burning a hole in your pocket you should be very happy with your purchase.
Yes, the season finale was anti-climatic, but you can’t deny the power this show has. It’s big, epic and has some incredibly smart character work, especially considering how many characters they balance.
This show is iconic for a reason. Tim Kring and Jeph Loeb know what they’re doing.
Think about it. They take superhero stereotypes (healing factor, the Jeckyll & Hyde split personality, teleportation, flight, invisibility, telekinesis, etc) and ground it in some really. Television really is a great way to make a moving graphic novel. You can balance all these characters and if you’re lucky you can make something fantastic.
Consider how fully fleshed out most of the characters on Heroes are. Consider how many layers there are to Sylar, the big villain of the show. Consider just how iconic some of the characters are. The cheerleader, Hiro, the beautiful Tim Sale paintings…
Yes, I’m a big fan of this show and they really went all out for the Season One DVD set.
I have seen both the Standard Def and HD set. I’ll get to the HD-DVD specifics in a moment, but there really isn’t a drastic difference.
There are more commentaries than you can shake a stick at. I’ve never really understood that saying, but it fits here. At least half the episodes have a full length commentary, each commentary have at least 3 people. Every single one of the main characters get a chance to talk. In fact, there was only one noticeable absence: Ali Larter.
On the commentaries: Hayden Panettiere, Masi Oka, James Kyson Lee (Ando), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder), Jack Coleman (Mr. Bennett), Milo Ventimiglia, Noah Gray-Cabey, Greg Grunberg, Zachary Quinto, Jimmy-Jean Louis (Haitian), Santiago Cabrera, Leonard Roberts (DL), Matthew John Armstrong (Ted Sprague), George Takai and a lot of the writers and directors, including Tim Kring, Jeph Loeb and Allan Arkush.
Did you know that Allan Arkush, one of the main directors, directed ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL? How awesome is that?
Greg Grunberg (Parkman) is the most common commentator and probably the one with the most geeky energy. He loves this shit and is having so much fun that he shouts it from the rooftops.
Most of the cast members keep the commentaries light and funny. I can’t think of one that I was bored through, even the one that was nothing but the top level creators’ assistants. That one was a bit awkward, but still fun.
There are tons of behind the scenes and department specific documentaries (ie stunts, effects, etc) on the final disc. My favorite being the one focusing on how they do the freeze-time effects… surprisingly low-tech.
So, I updated my player, I connected it to the internets and I got all ready for the web-enabled features and bam… got the HD-DVD set and I was ready to go.
The only big feature I watched on the Standard Def discs was the commentary on the original unaired 72-minute pilot by Tim Kring. I listened to all the other commentaries on the HD discs and there’s a reason.
Let’s talk about the web-enabled features first. I have to say, pretty lame. There’s a little MySpace-like “which super power would you have” questionnaire, but it’s difficult to type in your choices with the remote and for some odd reason my player kept taking me out of the menu half-way through filling it out, each of the three times I tried.
Now, the download center is pretty cool and I can see that feature really being awesome. I downloaded the Comic-Con preview for Season 2 and chose not to download the previews for future Universal DVD releases like KNOCKED UP.
The only drawback I see here is that the downloaded content was not in HD and I think the reason is the small amount of memory the DVD players come with. In the future, I’m sure there will be plenty, but just the SD Season 2 preview I downloaded took up a third of my available memory.
However, the U-control features on this are outstanding. You can turn on 4 things. Helix Revealed which alerts you whenever the half-helix symbol of the show is hidden into a scene (quite often, I must say), Character Connections which pretty much creates the string chart from later in the series explaining how each of the characters are connected (be it through blood, friendship or a chance interaction), picture in picture audio commentary and Artwork Presentation where you can get a closer look at the comic book and paintings each time they pop up in a scene.
The Picture In Picture commentaries were my favorites. You can hear the commentaries on the SD set, but there is something really cool about watching these people interact.
They recorded the commentaries on different sets as they were shooting season 1, so most of the time the actors are in costume. It’s a multiple camera set up and sometimes the wandering camera focuses on weird things. There’s one commentary featuring Hayden Panettiere where the cameraman is obsessed with her hands, which are occasionally fidgeting in her lap. I felt a little creepy watching that, like some sick hand-fetishist peeping tom. But it’s all good.
Of the commentaries, the one that stuck out the most for me was George Takai’s. He brought up Star Trek a lot (sometimes randomly) and was flamboyant enough to really cause some chuckles. It wasn’t that he would make a suggestive comment, but how the others with him (I think Masi Oka was there as well) would pause awkwardly then continue on. If it was a vocal commentary only you might not notice, but seeing the wheels turn… “Do I acknowledge that or do I just keep going like nothing happened?” was awesome.
The sound and transfer were great, of course. Hopefully as downloadable extras content becomes quicker and better that feature will improve. You do get more with the HD-DVD box set, so it shouldn’t even be a question if you have an HD-DVD player which version to pick up.
I have a few more DVDs either here or coming, including another batch from Criterion, so I’ll be back soon to discuss those. Thanks for reading!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
