The Bridge: The Complete First Season (US) (Fox, Blu-ray, DVD) – The U.S. has a long and complicated history of remaking foreign shows, with a lot of failures but also a lot of success stories. The Bridge is one of the more natural imports. The original show, a dark murder mystery procedural from Denmark, throws a cross-border complication into a case where the victim is found lying across the borderline on a bridge between Sweden and Denmark, just the first of many twists. The American reworking drops the premise into the border crossing between El Paso and Juarez, the Mexican side being the murder capital of cartel-dominated territories along the border, and comes ready-made with political, social, cultural, and personal issues to complicate the investigation of what appears to be the murder of an American judge with an anti-immigration record but turns out to be part of a serial killing spree.
The volatile culture of the setting enriches the procedural but it’s the partnership of American homicide detective Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger), an obsessive, brilliant, by-the-book cop with borderline Asperger’s symptoms, and Chihauhau State Police detective Marco Ruiz (Demian Bichir), a moral cop in an amoral system who latches on to this cross-jurisdictional case because it may allow him to do real police work unencumbered by corrupt bosses, that defines the show. They are a great team, with his ability to charm, cajole, and put people at ease teaching her a thing or two about the human side of the job and her genius putting together disparate clues into a pattern that eludes everyone else.
I also appreciate how the show doesn’t keep playing games with the identity of the killer and even solves the case before the season is over. Because the show, with its diverse cast and multiple storylines intertwining, is about more than this one case. As we get pulled into the characters and the tension between the cultures on either side of the border crossing, it reminds us that there is far more wrong here than a serial killer targeting a few victims and leaving the clues out for the detectives. There are hundreds of murders and missing women on the Mexican side that Americans never confront because that problem belongs to another country. Except that the relationship between the territories is much more complex than that and the series explores the way the cultures and economies and criminal enterprises are intertwined. Ted Levine, one of my favorite character actors, plays Sonya’s protective commanding officer, Annabeth Gish is the widow of a landowner who discovers her husband’s underworld activities after his death, Matthew Lillard and Emily Rios are reporters, and Catalina Sandino Moreno is Marco’s wife, who plays a more central role in the story as it unfolds.
13 episodes on four discs on DVD, with commentary on the pilot episodes, two featurettes and deleted scenes. Also available to stream from Hulu Plus.
This is a good time to remind you that The Bridge: Season One (Denmark) (MHz, DVD), the original Scandinavian series, is also now available. The show opens with a murder victim found in the middle of a bridge between Sweden and Denmark, but that’s only the beginning of the complications. Police from both countries discover that it’s actually two bodies cut in half and stitched together into a single corpse, and have to work together across borders. 10 episodes on four discs on DVD, all in Swedish and Danish with English subtitles, with cast and crew interviews.
Witches of East End: The Complete First Season (Fox, DVD) may qualify as my guilty pleasure of the season. This Lifetime Channel original series is not a remake of The Witches of Eastwick, mind you (creator Maggie Friedman already tried that) but a femme-centered supernatural series centered on a family of witches beset by a curse. Joanna Beauchamp (Julia Ormond) is immortal and doomed to watch her two daughters die before the age of thirty, at which point she becomes spontaneously pregnant again and the cycle comes back around, so this time around she hasn’t even told her girls, Freya (Jenna Dewan-Tatum) and Ingrid (Rachel Boston). Her more adventurous sister Wendy (Mädchen Amick), who has nine lives and a black cat alter-ego, arrives with news that Joanna and her daughters are in danger and sure enough, Joanna has an evil doppelganger show up and Freya is dragged into a netherworld by a centuries-old warlock. Time for a talk about their legacies. Protective mom Joanna reluctantly oversees their magic education and fun Aunt Wendy teases them with the fun side of magic. And of course there are the usual growing pains of mishaps and backfires along with the curses, attacks, and other weapons of magical warfare.
The series runs on Lifetime, where women are the focus, but it also borrows from shows like The Vampire Diaries and Once Upon a Time, where attractive stars and hot and sexy romances spice up the drama. The cheesecake is spread evenly across the sexes here, with Dewan-Tatum in revealing blouses and steamy sex scenes (lots of them dream sequences) with not one but two hot guys, her rich fiancé (Eric Winter) and his rebellious, bad-boy brother (Daniel DiTomasso), who is clearly trouble because his face is in perpetual five o’clock shadow. And the two “matrons” of the show, Ormond and Amick, are just as confident and gorgeous, with Amick’s Wendy constantly losing her clothes after shapeshifting into a cat and back again (it’s commercial cable so no nudity, just a lot of skin and suggestion). It makes you wonder if the creators were hoping to snag some male viewers into the estrogen drama, or maybe just acknowledging lesbian viewers along with the straight audience.
Whatever the demographic appeal, the show is fun and winning thanks to the strength of the four actresses and the family bonds that grow and strengthen along the season of discovery for the two daughters and the reconnection of the estranged sisters overcoming past conflicts to bond over their pact to break the curse and protect the two girls from death this time around. Virginia Madsen co-stars as a Freya’s future mother-in-law and Enver Gjokaj, Jason George, Tom Lenk, and Joel Gretsch co-star.
10 episodes on three discs, plus a featurette, deleted scenes, gag reel, and a collection of bloopers with the cat. Also available to stream from Netflix.
Adapted from the short stories of Mikhail A. Bulgakov, A Young Doctor’s Notebook (BBC, DVD) is a bleak British comedy series that mixes Russian gallows humor with wry British humor and some truly gruesome dark comedy. Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe play the doctor, the older, morphine-addicted veteran under investigation by the Russian authorities in 1934 Moscow and the young doctor in his first posting in a remote hospital in the snow-bound north. “I was happy in 1917,” he muses as he recalls those early days, a statement that says less about that crazy-making experience among the backward, illiterate population of rural Russia and more about the misery of his present state. Which may be why he doesn’t just muse over his past but actually shows up to converse with his younger self, offering advice and a poor role model for the young doctor slowly going crazy in his isolation. Be warned that blood is not just spilled, it is splattered, along with pus and diseased skin and in one scene a leg amputated with a dull bone-saw. Even my horror-movie hardened sensibilities were challenged in that moment of dark humor. A second series has already run on Britain. Four 23-minute episodes on DVD. Also available to stream from Netflix.
I Spy: The Complete Series (Timeless, DVD) collects the sixties spy show starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby as the hippest cold warriors on TV, jet-setting spies who joshed, joked, and goofed like old chums between tight situations and cloak-and-dagger cases. Culp is Kelly Robinson, a veteran agent who traveled under the guise of a playboy tennis amateur and minor sports celebrity, and Cosby is Alexander Scott, a Rhodes Scholar turned American agent who posed as Kelly’s trainer. This was the era of cold war spy shows like “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and “Mission: Impossible,” which cashed in on the popularity of James Bond and other big screen secret agents, but “I Spy” offered something different. It was actually shot in foreign locations in Asia and Europe as well as in the U.S., it downplayed the gadgets and gimmicks to present a more streetwise version of international spycraft, and it often wove social issues into its stories. The major draw, however, was the chemistry between the actors, whose rapport was established both in teamwork and in their often improvised their banter. And in addition to making the world safe for democracy, they effectively broke the color barrier by giving us black and white partners as both friends and equals (which led to it being banned by some TV stations in the American South). The series ran for three seasons and Cosby won three consecutive Emmy Awards. It remains one of the most entertaining shows of its kind. It has been released in various forms on DVD before but this set presents the complete series – 82 episodes on 18 discs – in a single collection for the first time. No supplements. Also available to stream on Hulu.
Jack Taylor: Set 2 (Acorn, DVD) returns to Galway to find Jack Taylor (Iain Glen), a hard-drinking ex-cop turned private detective, now six months “off the sauce” and working to maintain his sobriety while he helps former colleague Kate (Nora-Jane Noone) look into the apparent suicide of a college girl. That’s in “The Dramatist,” the first of three mysteries in the second series that follows Jack’s spiral back into the bottle and finally out of Galway when another case leaves his assistant in a coma. Through it all, Glen plays the soiled hero in a corrupt world, as flawed as they come but just the man to walk these mean streets of Galway. The culture and the personality of the setting give the shows a distinctive identity and Glen carves a great character out of the role. Nora-Jane Noone and Killian Scott co-star. Three feature-length mysteries on three discs, with a 20-minute interview with director Stuart Orme. Also available to stream from Acorn TV.
Also new and notable:
Masters of Sex: Season One (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD), produced for Showtime, stars Michael Sheen as Dr. William Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson, whose controversial study of human sexuality in the 1950s pioneered sexual research and anticipated the sexual revolution. 12 episodes on Blu-ray and DVD. The second season begins this month on Showtime.
Helix: The Complete First Season (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD) is the new SyFy series about an outbreak in an isolation research laboratory in the Arctic and the CDC task force trapped in the facility as the unidentified viral outbreak transforms its victims into monsters determined to replicate itself. 13 episodes on Blu-ray and DVD.
Hinterland: Series 1 (Acorn, DVD) takes the dark British detective series to Wales, where a London veteran (Richard Harrington) works with a local officer (Mali Harries) to solve mysteries on the tight-knit community suspicious of outsiders. Four feature-length mysteries on four discs.
Lovejoy: Series 1 (Acorn, DVD) rereleases the witty 1980s series starring Ian McShane as the charming rogue of an antiques dealer with a shady approach to sorting through the world of hidden treasures and worthless items. Phyllis Logan costars as an aristocrat attracted to both Lovejoy and his covert methods. 10 episodes on three discs. Also available to stream from Acorn TV.
Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Six (Paramount, Blu-ray) continues Paramount’s upgrade of the Star Trek TV shows to Blu-ray, and Star Trek: The Next Generation – Chain of Command (Paramount, Blu-ray) pulls out a two-part story for special treatment.
Series catch-up
Graceland: The Complete First Season (Fox, DVD), the FX original series about undercover FBI agents working out of a beachside manor in Los Angeles, came out a month ago but my copy arrived the day I published the TVD column. I’ve since seen it and liked it more than I expected. It takes a grittier approach than the usual USA network original series, which are generally defined by personable characters with lots of personality, light drama with plenty of humor and banter, and bright, colorful visual design on a budget, more like an FX crime drama like Justified than the playful USA approach to action.
The show stars Daniel Sunjata (Rescue Me) as the big brother of the melting pot of various agencies sharing the beachhouse as a base of operations, playing a veteran FBI agent who has become so reckless that the agency sends in a hotshot rookie agent (Aaron Tveit) to secretly investigate him. Vanessa Ferlito, Brandon Jay McLaren, Serinda Swan, and Manny Montana fill out the house as various FBI, DEA, and Customs agents all working solo but pitching in whenever a housemate needs a hand on a case. The premise is like 21 Jump Street meets The Real World: Hot Undercover Agents on the L.A. Coast and the drama is a mix of undercover drama, with all the secrets and schemes that entails, and hip action thriller taking on drug dealers, gun runners, gangs, and cartels. Sunjata plays the role as both veteran pro and adrenaline junkie, feeding on the danger and excitement of the job while Tveit is the clean cut, by-the-book company man who learns to improvise and cross the line to make a case. The motto of the house is “no secrets” but Sunjata has plenty of them, which only compounds suspicion when the agent investigating him is killed. While his story takes the entire season to come to a satisfying conclusion, each episode delivers at least one case closed. 12 episodes on three discs on DVD, plus the featurette “The Real Graceland,” deleted scenes and a gag reel.
You can also stream the first season on Hulu. The second season is currently underway on USA.
More releases:
The Boondocks: The Complete Series (Sony, DVD)
The Boondocks: The Complete Fourth Season (Sony, DVD)
NYPD Blue: Season 6 (Shout Factory, DVD)
Comedy Bang! Bang!: The Complete Second Season (IFC, DVD)
Lost Girl: Season Four (eOne, Blu-ray, DVD)
Anna Karenina (1977) (Acorn, DVD)
The Twilight Zone: Essential Episodes (55th Anniversary Collection) (Image, DVD)
Spiral: Season Four (MHz, DVD)
Arne Dahl (MHz, DVD)
Unni Lindell: The Cato Isaksen Mysteries – Set 1 (MHz, DVD)
Unni Lindell: The Cato Isaksen Mysteries – Set 2 (MHz, DVD)
Duck Dynasty: Season 5 (Lionsgate, Blu-ray, DVD)
American Experience: Freedom Summer (PBS, DVD)
Time Scanners: Egyptian Pyramids (PBS, DVD)
Cool Spaces!: The Best New Architecture (PBS, DVD)
Wild Brazil: Land of Fire and Flood (BBC, DVD)
Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America (PBS, DVD)
NOVA: Escape from Nazi Alcatraz (PBS, DVD)
Escape from a Nazi Death Camp (PBS, DVD)
Secrets of Underground London (PBS, DVD)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD
