Here are a couple of meat-and-potatoes TV series great for dad to start binge-watching on Father’s Day.
Shameless: The Complete Series (Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment, not rated, 2,130 minutes, 34 DVD discs, 1.78:1 aspect ratio, $89.99) — For a detailed instructional guide on how not to act as the patriarch of a family, let’s dive into a television series that explored the dysfunctional lives of the lower-working class Gallaghers and their booze and drug-addicted head of the household Frank.
Showtime’s Emmy Award-winning dramedy finally fully arrives in one set and in the not-preferred DVD format to allow new fans to watch every hilarious, twisted and politically incorrect moment from the entire 11-season, 134-episode run of the show.
Based on a successful British TV series of the same name, the extreme narrative relocated to the South Side of Chicago and introduces viewers to jobless and nearly homeless daddy Frank (William H. Macy); eldest street-smart daughter Fionna (Emmy Rossum); younger daughter Debbie (Emma Kenney); sons Lip (Jeremy Allen White), Ian (Cameron Monaghan), Liam (Christian Isaiah) and hustler Carl (Ethan Cutkosky) as the lower-class clan attempts to survive in a perilous urban environment.
Between the core group of children basically living on their own, holding menial jobs and running scams to survive, they are led by Fionna who keeps the cash barely flowing and maintaining organized chaos in the household while Frank sucks the life out of everyone around him.
Keeping the plots more complicated, friends of the family included the sexual adventurous next-door married couple, and owners of the local bar, The Alibi Room, Veronica “V” Fisher (Shanola Hampton) and Kevin “Kev” Ball, (Steve Howey); and romantic interests such as Frank’s sweetheart Sheila Jackson (Joan Cusack); Ian’s White supremacist boyfriend Mickey Milkovich (Noel Fisher); Veronica’s later wife Svetlana Yevgenivna (Isidora Goreshter); and the Gallaghers’ absentee mother Monica (Chloe Webb).
The show never pulled punches in covering nearly every cultural norm and un-norm through the outrageous and offensive shenanigans of the Gallaghers and their neighborhood posse. The series will not disappoint mature viewers looking for the most unusual of family dramas.
Best extras: Viewers get digital goodies culled from the seasons that were previously released on DVD and Blu-ray on discs precariously packed into a clamshell case.
That’s right, most of the season was released in the high definition disc format, making it a total head-scratcher that owners must deal with watching the show in this woefully inadequate DVD format.
Nonetheless, the extras include a couple of commentaries, over three hours of featurettes and deleted scenes from almost every season.
Highlights include an optional commentary tracks on the “Pilot,” with writer/director John Wells, executive producer Andrew Stern and actress Emmy Rossum; 19 minutes on writing the show; and the segment “Shameless Last Call” that offers about an hour’s worth of reflections from the cast and crew on the entire series.
The Drew Carey Show: The Complete Series (Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment, not rated, 5,160 minutes, 30 DVD discs, 1.78:1 aspect ratio, $89.99) — America’s every-guy, stand-up comedian of the 1990s stormed the broadcast airwaves back in 1995 to the delight of fans with a situation comedy that ran for nine seasons on the ABC network.
Drew Carey and co-creator Bruce Helford created a persona for Mr. Carey as a middle management Schmoe stuck in a boring job as an assistant director of personnel at a department store and living in his modest Cleveland home.
This perpetually nice guy’s life revolved around hanging with his best buddies — Lewis Kiniski (Ryan Stiles), Kate O’Brien (Christa Miller) and Oswald Lee Harvey (Diedrich Bader) — at home and at the local watering hole, the Warsaw Tavern, while dealing with life’s everyday struggles and looking for a better future.
Besides the core cast members, the show featured some really funny humans such as Kathy Kinney as Drew’s work archenemy secretary Mimi Bobeck; Craig Ferguson as Drew’s eventual boss Nigel Algernon Wick; John Carroll Lynch as Drew’s cross-dressing brother Steve Carey; as well as notable guest stars including Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Carol Channing, Bo Derek and Joe Walsh.
Almost all nine seasons of the show are in the set, offering 229 episodes of the original 233-episode run.
The missing episodes, specifically, “Drew’s Dance Party Special,” “Drew Carey’s Back-to-School Rock ‘n’ Roll Comedy Hour – Parts 1 & 2” and “What’s Love Got to Do with it?” were due to prohibitive costs of licensing the popular music used in the shows.
Notable extras: Despite finally being able to binge this classic sitcom on a physical media format, and that’s a huge gift for some fans, Warner does not deliver much of a 30th anniversary set.
Viewers only get a single, 19-minute featurette from the first season’s DVD release called “Life Inside a Cubicle,” with the co-creators and cast discussing the show.
That’s it, not even a single optional commentary track with Mr. Carey or any level of a retrospective documentary.
And, not to beat a dead sitcom, but once again, owners are stuck watching the show in the unappealing DVD format.
• Joseph Szadkowski can be reached at jszadkowski@washingtontimes.com.
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