Best TV on DVD By GINIA BELLAFANTE

The New York Times
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November 25, 2008
Best TV on DVD By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Each week seems to bring more and more releases of television series and specials on DVD. Are you hankering to relive the complete first season of “Spin City”? It’s just out. While it is impossible to see everything, a critic can still cull the best of the year, even if from a vaguely arbitrary list. So here we go:
Amazon
STATE OF PLAY
DVD
This political thriller, produced as a mini-series for British television a few years ago, won multiple awards in its homeland, including a Bafta prize for the incomparably sardonic Bill Nighy. Here he sheds his patrician inflections for the near-Cockney pronunciations of a newspaper editor overseeing the investigation of two seemingly unrelated murders — the death of a black teenager at gunpoint and the mysterious fall of a research assistant on the tracks of the London Underground — that ultimately hint at significant connection. The assistant belongs to an ambitious member of Parliament in both the professional and biblical senses. Anonymous faxes are sent, lives are endangered and marriages crumble in what amounts to six sublime hours of diversion from holiday whining and madness. (BBC Video, $34.98.)
Amazon
THE SOPRANOS: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Why? Because you have “Moby-Dick” in your library, don’t you? Individual seasons of “The Sopranos” are available, of course, but this set, just released, brings together all 86 episodes on 28 discs, with the added value of a conversation between Alec Baldwin and David Chase. (Mr. Baldwin had hoped for a role but never got one.) Other features include a photo album, CD soundtracks and a filmed dinner with cast members. For $399.99, and especially in the current climate, we might want the recipes for every plate of veal Carmella ever produced — no, actually, the veal itself — but still, a complete set of one of the greatest series television has ever produced seems to fall in the ranks of cultural essentials. (HBO Video, $399.99.)
Amazon
MAD MEN, SEASON ONE
DVD
You have friends, cousins, brothers-in-law, ex-girlfriends — maybe in Denver, maybe around the block — who have yet to experience the exquisite historicism of “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner’s series about consumer glorification and marital malfeasance in the New York of the early 1960s. Even though it seems as if everyone is watching, very few people actually are, so it is incumbent on viewers in the know to serve as cultural ambassadors and spread the word through gift giving. The first 13 episodes make up a season nearly as perfect as any that have come around. (Lionsgate, $39.99.)
Amazon
FORTYSOMETHING
Before he starred as a dyspeptic genius physician on “House,” Hugh Laurie starred as a dyspeptic physician in the thrall of a midlife crisis in the British comedy “Fortysomething.” Here he plays Paul Slippery, a man dealing with his wife’s professional turnaround and her possible wandering eye. At work he is mired in bureaucracy and at home he is given little reprieve, tortured as he is by his three sex-obsessed sons. The series, which was shown in 2003, is six episodes long; Mr. Laurie directed the first three. What “House” fan is likely to return it? (Acorn, $39.99.)
Amazon
FREAKS AND GEEKS: THE YEARBOOK EDITION
DVD
Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, this short-lived dramatic comedy about the politics of a suburban Detroit high school in the 1980s can be given to just about anyone from 38 to 50 with a nostalgia for paneling, army jackets, ski coats and other signifiers of early-’80s slackerdom. It is almost guaranteed to elicit a wistful, enthusiastic response. The current collection is a revamped version of one that preceded it in 2004, with two bonus DVDs and six hours of supplemental commentary and interviews. It also comes with a book — a yearbook, as it were — of essays and memorabilia. “Freaks and Geeks” is sweet and quietly funny, and it gave rise to the careers, as its devoted fans will remind you, of Seth Rogen, James Franco and Jason Segel, essential purveyors of the Apatow ethos. (Shout! Factory, $169.99.)
Amazon
FOYLE’S WAR, SET 5
This set contains three separate but related 100-minute films commissioned by the ITV network and revolving around the assignments that land on the desk of Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (played just short of ornery by the talented Michael Kitchen) during World War II. Closed off from the action on the front lines, Foyle is sent to Hastings, on the south coast of England, to battle the war’s residual wrongdoing: the murder and bribery committed by the politically ambitious and the profiteering. Foyle doesn’t drink, yell or tomcat — he’s been given none of the detective’s standard character flaws — but he is still riveting at every step of his crime solving. The visual pleasures are there, too: “Foyle’s War” is exacting in its period details of wartime English countryside. (Acorn, $49.99.)