Box set does justice to 'MI-5' British spies
By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service
When the first season of the British TV series "MI-5" was released here last year on DVD, I described it as "24" without guilt, by which I meant to say this spy drama was only slightly more understated than American TV's most melodramatic drama.
With "MI-5 Volume 2" (3 stars, BBC), the 10 episodes from Season 2 now compiled on DVD, and the third season now airing on A&E, it is obvious the show is almost as shameless as its American counterpart.
The second season begins with team leader Tom Quinn (Matthew MacFadyen ) stranded outside his super-secure house while inside his home are his girlfriend, her young daughter and a laptop computer booby-trapped with a bomb. Though so far no one has screamed "The virus is out!" on "MI-5," the stakes are set super-high in every chapter, which, unlike "24's" installments, can stand alone, though they're still best watched in sequence.
With the exception of Paramount and its excellent "Star Trek" sets, BBC is setting the standard for what box sets ought to be: This one is a 5-disc affair with all the shows in wide-screen and restored stray cuts made for commercial TV broadcast. There is also two hours of deleted material among the copious extras.
Cop shows
"Monk," starring Tony Shalhoub as a phobia-plagued Sherlock, has a fan base almost as obsessive as the detective. Its members will be certain to snap up "Monk — Season Two" (3 stars, Universal), a 4-disc set in which the detective manages to solve no less than 16 cases and still find the humor in crippling mental illness.
Despite one national critic declaring this the best cop show in decades (he has apparently missed "The Wire," not to mention most seasons of "Homicide" and "NYPD Blue"), "Monk" hits me as this decade's "Columbo," far more about the sleuth than the story, but entertaining for all that.
Then, of course, there was "Wiseguy," which was yet another great idea: Cop goes deep undercover to crack tough organized crime cases and ends up torn between his new criminal employers and pals and the fuddy-duddy old government suits. It pretty much petered out after a sterling trifecta of story lines, the best of which pitted the undercover cop Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl) against a very strange Kevin Spacey as smuggler Mel Profitt, in the performance that sent him to Hollywood.
Now we're onto the fourth volume, "Between the Mob and a Hard Place" (3 stars, Ventura), which is actually the first half of Season 3 on four discs. It chronicles the brooding Vinnie's return to the mob to finish the job he started in the original episodes when he became right-hand man to Sonny Steelgrave (the late Ray Sharkey), despite the fact that his mom is now married to the new boss. This looked like a major falling-off when it originally aired in 1989, but in comparison to the various imitators that have followed it its wake, it stands up pretty well.
While we're at it, during one of the many breaks taken by "NYPD Blue," its network plugged the time spot with a nonfiction series called "ABC Presents: NYPD Blue 24/7" (3 stars, ABC/Koch), which had Dennis Franz providing narration to an otherwise cinema vÚritÚ look at how real New York detectives work.
The news crew followed various cases and cops for 16 months and pared it all down to seven hours of fascinating TV that turns everyone who watches it into an amateur detective, following the trail and clues along with the cops. Of all the networks, ABC is doing the best job of getting its good documentary work preserved on disc; the other networks are far more concerned with getting out "uncensored" versions of their reality shows.
'The village'
Speaking of reality, the most interesting thing about the week's major recent theatrical release on disc, M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village," may not be that it gets tricked out in a special "Vista" series special edition (1 star, Buena Vista) that seeks to bestow an aura of importance on it, but the release, as a companion, of the alleged documentary "The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan," which originally aired on the Sci Fi channel before the film's release.
The show was hyped as an exposÚ that revealed a dark secret in Shyamalan's past that would shed light on his obsession with the supernatural. But before it aired, it was acknowledged that its big scoop — something about a drowning the young Shyamalan witnessed — was a fabrication, and that the entire enterprise had been stunt.
"The Village" is a period piece about a small, puritanical but idealistic religious settlement that is isolated from the outside world by mysterious creatures who lurk in the woods surrounding it. William Hurt is the town leader and Joaquin Phoenix is the brave young man who dares to break the treaty with the fearsome unknown by attempting to reach the outside world.
When it was released last summer, many people compared it to a lesser "Twilight Zone" episode; over at Amazon.com, critic Jeff Shannon pinpointed the exact episode: "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," starring Cliff Robertson, and originally aired in 1961.
And speaking of "The Twilight Zone," its debut season, 1959-60, has been released yet again in a box called "The Definitive Edition — Season 1" (Image). I did not receive a copy for review, but I am told all the black-and-white episodes have been remastered from an original camera negative and look and sound better than they have in previous incarnations.
It also includes the legendary unaired pilot of the first show, "Where is Everybody?" which concludes with creator-host Rod Serling making a pitch to network executives to buy his show, please.
