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'The Shield: The Complete Series Collection'/Sony
"The Shield" debuted on the FX cable channel early in 2002 and ended its seven-season run in 2008 with one of the greatest series finales ever broadcast. In between it blurred the line between good cop and bad cop with Michael Chiklis' Vic Mackey, a maverick officer at once corrupt and dedicated. Creator Shawn Ryan and his crew keep surprising us with the turns the stories take yet never compromise the integrity of the show or the characters. The volatile series revels in the contradictions and compromises of the characters, but it understands exactly where everyone draws their moral lines. They just happen to draw them in different places.

This collection features all 88 episodes of the seven seasons on 28 discs in a hefty scrapbook album-style case with slipsleeve pages. I'm personally not a fan of the design (it's hard to actually get a grip on the discs in the paperboard pages without getting your fingerprints all over the program side), and, like so many of these sets, it won't fit on a standard DVD rack, but it's a handsome package nonetheless. It also features the supplements from earlier season releases: lively commentary tracks, featurettes, deleted scenes, interviews and the rest. Exclusive to this edition is a bonus with two new featurettes: "Rampart," an original half-hour documentary on the Los Angeles Rampart division police scandal that inspired the show, and a seven-minute memorial for "The Barn." If you've got the earlier releases, it's not worth trading them in, but it's the most efficient way to get the complete collection from scratch.
     ©Disney
Zorro: The Complete First Season (Walt Disney Treasures)
Zorro: The Complete Second Season (Walt Disney Treasures)
Guy Williams, a B-movie actor with matinee-idol looks, leapt into the saddle of this late-'50s half-hour adventure series (Disney's first foray into a traditional weekly series) with all the flair of a born action hero. He's charmingly thick as Don Diego, the cavalier who poses as a fop, and perfectly dashing as the swashbuckling Robin Hood of Old California, and the mix of broad comedy and frontier action is still fun after all these years. Leonard Maltin introduces and hosts each set. Thirty-nine half-hour episodes in living black and white per season (plus two bonus "Zorro" episodes from the anthology series "Walt Disney Presents" and other archival goodies) on six discs efficiently collected in a standard case with hinged trays, all in a collectible tin.
    ©Warner
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The Complete Season One
George Lucas continues the "Star Wars" saga with this animated series set between the movies "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." It's surely the best looking animated show on TV, and the wide-screen frame gives it even more majesty. But there's something disturbing about a kids' show where every moral lesson is learned in the heat of battle. Twenty-two episodes (in seven extended "director's cut" versions) on four discs in a booklet case, a 64-page scrapbook with sketches, artwork and character designs from the series, and there's a behind-the-scenes featurette for each episode.
       ©Warner Archive
The Eleventh Hour: The Complete Series
Rufus Sewell is Dr. Jacob Hood, a scientific genius turned one-man CDC, in the American remake of the British miniseries about the government's man on the spot whenever there's a crisis that smacks of scientific tinkering or experiments gone wrong. Think "Fringe" meets "House," with less personality but more personability. Marley Shelton is his FBI protector, part straight woman and part action hero sidekick. The series lasted a single season of 18 episodes, and debuts on the Warner Archive label, the DVD-R burn-on-demand line, on six discs in a wide case with hinged trays.
Series Info | Buy DVD | Exclusive Video: Watch clip
        ©PBS Home Video
The Botany of Desire
Michael Pollan hosts this public television documentary based on his nonfiction book about the way nature caters to human desires to survive, and the way human behavior affects the equation. "As much as it's a story about plants," he explains, "it's a story about human desire," and he takes four case studies to make his point. The observations are enlightening. Arrives on DVD and Blu-ray a week after its debut on public television, and features 15 minutes of deleted scenes and half an hour of bonus interviews with Pollan among the supplements.

Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for MSN Entertainment, and a contributing writer to GreenCine.com, Turner Classic Movies Online, Parallax View and Asian Cult Cinema, among other publications. You can find links to all of this and more on his shamelessly self-promoting blog

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