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New DVDs give TV Sci-Fi fans a hot payoff
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Posted by: drew2k

Newsday has a good, short article today about how TV Sci-Fi is finding a home on DVD, and briefly covers new and recent releases like Roswell, Jeremiah, Voyager, and Firefly.

quote:
Tabasco for 'Roswell' Fans
New DVDs give fans of this and other TV sci-fi a hot payoff

By Diane Werts
STAFF WRITER

February 17, 2004

If there's one TV format that really flies on DVD, it's sci-fi. Some of the earliest DVD releases came from the science fiction-fantasy genre - "Twilight Zone," "Stargate SG-1," episodes of the original "Star Trek" - and it's still one of the most popular types of programming. The nearly 80,000 users of the essential consumer Web site TVShowsonD VD.com keep sci-fi titles at the top of their voting list for series most wanted to see on DVD.

"Roswell" led that list for many a month until Warner Home Video announced its first season would be released today in a six-disc wide-screen set ($60 list price). The show's appeal is now easier than ever to see, especially to the young devotees who kept the flame burning by sending bottles of Tabasco sauce to critics and network executives in support of a show that struggled through two middling- rated seasons on The WB and a final stanza on UPN.

Why Tabasco? See the DVD. The show's leads have a fondness for the stuff. Turns out they aren't regular New Mexico teens at all but descendants of aliens who crashed in the UFO-famed town. How to fit in and define themselves? Well, isn't that every adolescent's anxiety? This universal theme spawned the show, as explained in both a new half-hour documentary and in optional audio commentary from cast and crew throughout six significant episodes.

Writer Jason Katims started out adapting the "Roswell High" tween books in 1999 as "a teen drama with a twist," he says on DVD, sort of an alien-themed "Dawson's Creek." But "it ended up being a science-fiction show with teens." That "darker" tone emerges through this initial season's 22 hours, in which Katims discovered what genre lovers have long appreciated: "the deep connection between science fiction and emotional storylines."

Not to mention philosophical ones. The format's freedom to play with time, place and physics may look like a handy storytelling conceit, but it actually enables profound contemplation of our world in ways you'll never see on a "CSI" or "NYPD Blue." That's clear even in the shoot-'em-up space Western "Firefly," the truncated 2002 Fox fantasy from sneaky "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" thinker Joss Whedon. His claim of network mistreatment gets support from Fox Home Entertainment's four-disc complete series set ($50). Its 14 episodes are shown wide-screen in the much-different order Whedon originally intended, including three hours never aired.

Also on DVD is a new half-hour documentary with Whedon and his team discussing this "source of more joy and pain than anything I've ever done." Its content illuminates the show's perspective on future life spawned from Earth's American and Chinese empires, and spotlights the vibrant handheld shooting of a show he "didn't want to be stately" like most TV sci-fi. Whedon gets even deeper in a confessional solo commentary on his final "Objects in Space" episode - a ramblingly engaging odyssey through "existential epiphany," tactile imagery and Sartre. DVD features like this reveal much more to these shows than first meets the eye. Or mind's eye.

That's one reason all of Paramount's "Star Trek" series seem a bit disappointing in DVD release. While their "extras" content has expanded to multiple featurettes with more fresh interviews (and date-labeled archive footage), it all tends to dwell more on nuts and bolts than ideas and visions. "Star Trek: Voyager" arrives on DVD next Tuesday with its five- disc first season of 15 wide-screen episodes (no list price, but around $100; other seasons to follow through 2004). As with preceding "Trek" series, they're unencumbered by commentary tracks delving into allegories, ethics or allusions.

What "Voyager" does offer is a glimpse of original captain Genevieve Bujold, whose on- set stint lasted less than a week. The several scenes shown in both raw and edited footage reveal a quite different approach than eventual star Kate Mulgrew. A half-dozen other featurettes focus on such aspects as alien creatures, special effects and the "real" science of wormholes.

That's more than you get with the six-disc first season of Showtime's "Jeremiah" (MGM, $80), a buddy drama of chaos after an apocalyptic Big Death kills everyone above the age of puberty. Its 19-episode exploration of "people [who] try to be decent in an indecent world," as star Luke Perry puts it, comes from respected "Babylon 5" creator J. Michael Straczynski. But it isn't probed much on DVD by a single actor's commentary (Perry with co-star Malcolm-Jamal Warner) and a five-minute promotional featurette.