Loading ...Everwood and TV Series DVDs
As some of you know, I also run a website devoted to DVD news and reviews. DVDMon.com has been up now for over five years. Recently I got to review a new DVD set put out by Warner Home Video of the first season of the WB series Everwood. I thought I’d include the review here too, because in it I talk about issues around dvd releases, content distribution, and the dilemma that some of us can be faced with when we coming into a series fresh after it’s been going for a while, and still running strong:
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My TV watching has declined a lot in recent years. Part of this was due to moving in with my now wife in a condo that got bad reception and refusing to pay for the high prices of Washington DC cable. Since we moved out to the suburbs, bought a new TV, and a TiVo, we’ve been watching more, but still not large amounts. Part of my problem is that I want to be able to watch a series from the beginning. Coming in on the third season seems like coming into a movie in the middle.
Everwood was a show that I remember hearing about when it came out a couple of years ago, but at the time we just didn’t get the WB network due to poor reception. Luckily Warner Home Video, as they and others have done with many other series, have made the first season of Everwood available on DVD. So I sat down and watched all 23 episodes in less than a week! Yes, I got hooked. And of course when you have an entire season at your disposal, it’s just too easy to say “well, what the heck, let’s just watch ONE more.”
Everwood, for those who haven’t seen it, is about a famous neurosurgeon, Dr. Andy Brown (Treat Williams), whose wife dies in the pilot. Fame had to do partly due to his dedication, but this translates into being a “workaholic” especially when it means missing almost every important event in your family’s life. His 15-year-old son Ephram (Gregory Smith) despises him. He was amazingly close to his mother, but practically a stranger to his father. Delia (Vivien Cardone), Andy’s 9-year-old daughter, is still too young to have garnered anything but love and admiration for her father. Soon after the death of his wife, Andy decides to move the entire family to the small mountain town of Everwood, Colorado where he opens a doctors office where he sees patients for free. So, Ephram hates him even more for taking him totally out of his element (one which he apparently had a shakey grasp on to begin with - being somewhat of a geek-loner), and even Delia struggles to make even one new friend. The main thrust of the first season revolves around Amy Abbot (Emily VanCamp), who befriends Ephram in order to get his father to operate on her boyfriend who is in a coma. Her father, Dr. Harold Abbott (Tom Amandes), also happens to be the town’s only doctor before Dr. Brown and family come to town. His ornery, persnickety nature is only made more so by the freewheeling Dr. Brown who often displays the tunnel vision of an idealist. But Dr. Abbot is not the one-sided villain to Andy’s Hero that you would get from a predictable show. Everwood constantly surprises you by foiling those stereotypes. No one is a villain and a hero so much as they are all humans with their own flaws as well as strengths.
I think of Everwood as kind of a mutated Northern Exposure, but with a lot more family relationship stuff thrown in. Like Northern Exposure, it’s about a New Yorker (or New Yorkers as the case is) going someplace far from home where he experiences culture shock, meets lots of cute small-town characters, and becomes in integral part of the community. The family stuff, though, adds a powerful supplement to what could be seen as a formula, and the excellent writing and acting, similar to Northern Exposure, is always a valuable asset. Everwood doesn’t shy away from controversial issues like porn and abortion, and I found myself cringing a few times, which I suppose is a good thing in a way. The treatment of these issues is ultimately sensitive and multidimensional, but due to their nature if they were handled with too soft a touch, you wouldn’t get the impact that they really should have on many of us. Feeling a little uncomfortable sometimes I think shows that a show is really touching some buttons. And Everwood touches a lot of buttons, not so much because of contrived situations that make us sad, or music that helps it to tough on the heartstrings, but by some dialog that is honest and sometimes brutally so. It’s character development is such that we really understand the impact when one person does or says something to another, we feel it ourselves much more than in cardboard cut-out clichés that make up much of what TV and Cinema has become.
The DVD set comes with 6 DVD’s containing the 23 episodes. In addition to these, there is a 24-minute making of featurette that fills in some of the history of how the pilot was developed and filmed, and then subsequently how Everwood made its way through its first season. Another feature is a short clip of video that is taken first by Gregory Smith, then my Emily VanCamp - basically just candids from behind the set. Finally, there is a series of 10 or so deleted scenes both with and without a commentary track. These were helpful in giving even more insight into the characters. Apparently they often shoot more than the allotted 45 minutes for each episode and have to throw away at least a little for most episodes. So theoretically there might have been even more of these on the cutting room floor, but these give a nice enough taste of what we might have if the show were a bit longer, or without commercial breaks. Warner Brothers also provided commentary tracks for 4 of the 23 episodes - the pilot, the 5th show “Deer God”, the 20th show, “Moonlight Sonata,” and the finale, “Home.” The constants in these were the executive producers Greg Berlanti and Mickey Liddell, but Treat Williams is in most of them as well. In addition, Tom Amandes is in a couple and Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp are both in one respectively. Generally Berlanti and Lidell do most of the talking in these, although Treat Williams can get a little talkative as well. The others are generally much more quiet. I did enjoy the commentaries and they of course gave a lot of additional insight, but I do wish they would have included more of the actors and allowed those actors to talk more. Instead it seems like the most talkative of the groups got to drown out everyone else. The other thing that bothered me a little was that Treat Williams was constantly joking. It was obviously a very amiable environment on set and that was reflected in these commentary tracks, but especially when some pretty heavy scenes were being shown I would have rather not had Treat goofing about his beard or some other piece of silliness. Nevertheless, these are somewhat minor quibbles; in general I really enjoyed the commentary tracks as well as the other special features.
The first season of Everwood (I don’t know about the 2nd or 3rd), was filmed in standard 4:3 aspect ratio, although apparently they letterboxed the premier episode and the finale. Nevertheless, none of these episodes are enhanced for widescreen. The picture is still very good, although I’m hoping that future seasons get put on HD video. The sound is also quite good, and while it is a very dialog-centric series, of course, the creations of Blake Neely add a lot to the sound of Everwood.
Now the only thing I need is Everwood Season Two. This brings me to something else I wanted to write about - TV Series on DVD. As I mentioned, I’m one of those people who like to see things from the beginning and in order. Now that I’ve seen the first season of this series on DVD, I have a dilemma. Do I just read the season synopses of all the episodes from Season 2 and 3 that I’ve missed and start watching from the middle of the 3rd season? Or do I refuse to watch anything on TV at the moment and wait until Season 2 comes out on DVD? If Season 2 were out now, I would gladly buy it, or at the very least rent it. I realize that getting a whole season of series like Everwood onto DVD is a chore, let alone two seasons. And I know some of this is marketing decisions. I guess it’s figured that doling out a little of a series at a time will garner more hunger for it. But on the flipside of this is the fact that if a new viewer is created by the series making its way to DVD, wouldn’t many of those would-be new viewers (for the show in its current season) be created if all the episodes were available so that these new viewers could “catch up” completely? Maybe I’m the exception to the rule, I don’t know. Maybe I’m also a bit spoiled by my new TiVo, but my basic preference now is of course to be able to view the content that’s been produced and not have to wait for some arbitrary decision by a marketing executive. But maybe that’s just me. I had a similar dilemma with Six Feet Under. I saw the first season live, then didn’t have HBO when the second season aired, and got it back when the third season started. But the availability on DVD always lagged by a couple of seasons, so I could never catch up and get current - especially since I didn’t even have TiVo for most of this time. What I’d really love to see is for content companies to provide these shows to us in a much more flexible way. I know a lot of this has to do with being able to make money with these shows - on TV or via rentals or sales. But I would be perfectly willing to pay if it meant that I could get whatever episode of a series I wanted at any time, streamed or downloaded of the net from the content provider’s site. Hopefully these companies will get wise and offer something akin to this soon. Currently my only choice is to go look for a copy of the show online, a prospect whose legality is questionable at the very least. Offer choices and people will bite, lack of choices often cause people to create solutions for themselves - solutions that don’t make these companies any money, but only causes headaches for both the potential viewer as well as the company trying to prevent unauthorized copying of their intellectual property.
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January 17th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Just did a real quick read - but I don’t know if the decision to release a DVD long after the season is over as arbitrary. Often after a season ends here in the U.S., they have yet to even commence their first run elsewhere. Although I’ve never been there nor have investigated their T.V. scheduling, I imagine Australia follows the same course we have here, showing first runs during the fall/winter when more people are likely to be indoors. (Fox, noticeably, has bucked this trend).
Additionally, syndication indubitably plays a roll here; Syndication stations are less likely to attract advertiser dollars once a show is released on DVD.
Lastly I imagine production values may delay the release as well. DVDs with commentary and special features are more likely to sell than those without, hence negotiations, contracting, and scheduling of the talent can add significant delays.
But I agree with you that the net and computers have not so much caused a paradigm shift as much as they have opened up opportunities for new and more profitable business models. And I don’t think DRM is the solution either. Rather, having a captive audience is both the trick to maintaining advertiser dollars and providing on-demand DRM free media. The means to achieve this would be through the merger of the internet, content, and Product Placement.
Years ago, when the net first took off, and I first herd of WebTV, I envisioned a world where you could pause a show or movie (al~la TIVO) and use your mouse to highlight an actor or part of the set, click on it, and be able to order the very items right on line. (I should patent this idea! OK. This post shows that I came up with the idea. Want to patent it for me, Levi? We’ll go 70/30!). Two things are achieved – the show itself becomes the medium for advertising, while the advertising in itself being obtrusive, and both marketing metrics and sell dollars are gained from the MIS/Sells that are generated from the pauses, clicks, and items sold. I recall (and can vouch on the fact) that intrusive advertisement is often rejected by the captive audience, distracting them from the story line [should I use the buzzword, “narrative”?] and ruining the narrative flow [There! I used the word, narrative!]. But if you are aware that you can, in fact, pause and purchase, your cognition of the props morphs into a sub-surface consciousness. Upon a second viewing you’re more likely to pause and purchase. >>This is key
January 17th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Yeah, I hate that word, too. Not very elegant! How about the LaContentNostra? Hahah. You have a good point about syndication which I hadn’t thought of. I think the problem is that we’ve become more used to getting our shows the way we want. We’ve long been able to tape things on VHS for long term storage or just if we’re away, but TiVo has expanded the capacity, made it easier, etc. With the advent of DVD’s, movies now are rentable or purchasable within a month or two of leaving the theater in many cases. The internet, as you say, has made “sharing” much easier as well. The content company’s reaction has generally been defensive and reactionary. They are getting better, but they still have a long way to go before actually anticipating and taking advantage of people’s natural desires instead of trying to combat them.
One example of this is pointed out often by Phil Terrone of Engagdet in his podcasts when he talks about how it’s difficult to record your dvd’s, tivo content, etc. to a personal media player, even though this is how these devices are advertized to work. Because the content companies are so litigious, the PMP manufacturers leave it up to the users to figure out the details, and so many of them are forced to go to file-sharing apps to download movies because they don’t know they can or can’t figure out how to copy their own dvd’s onto these devices. So they are then presented with all the dvd’s they don’t own, and end up downloading many of these too, thus depriving the content companies of potential revenue. I agree, DRM gets in the way more than it helps, and most have been defeated eventually. If content companies don’t want to fight an endless battle against the hacker and their own customers, they need to think much more progressively about all this and do something like what you mention with product placement stuff. Although I also have visions of banner ads on content that simply can’t be removed! But hey, even if a content company released a bunch of their content for free distribution to these file-sharing apps but with some kind of commercial breaks embedded that were short enough to where it was more of a bother to fast forward through them than not (maybe 15-second spots?) and at points that weren’t totally intrusive, maybe that would be one potential solution.
But I do think that if we continue on this path, that many companies will go out of business because they will drive a lot of their customers to get their content in illicit ways and these companies won’t be getting ANY revenue. At least if they considered it inevitable, they could find a way to collect revenue from advertizers, or perhaps they could provide streaming versions of their content for a fee, be it subscription-based or ala carte. Anyway, maybe these companies are discussing a lot of these already, at least I hope they are…
February 5th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
A year later and you no longer hear “content provider”
Yea!
July 3rd, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Are seasons 2, 3 available for Everwood?
July 3rd, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Kathleen, nope, no sign of any other seasons, which only compels a lot of people to get them the only way they can - through illicit means…