This past Valentine’s Day, my wife and I exchanged gifts, both of them being DVD collections of two T.V. series that we enjoy. I got a classic favourite T.V. show of mine from the ’80s, Magnum P.I. and bought her a more recent series that she liked, Grimm (I actually liked it, too).
Both shows are very different in content, but one of the things that we enjoy about both of these programs is the tongue-in-cheek humour in the writing. Both programs cover some pretty intense plot-lines, from time to time, but sprinkled even within those episodes is a bit of wit. Overall, though, both show generally don’t take themselves too seriously, which helps keep their entertainment value; at least for me.
At the moment, we’re about to complete season two of Magnum, but we just finished watching the final episode of Grimm, after a couple of weeks of watching it when we sat down to eat. At first, we weren’t all that sure if we would like Grimm, as gore isn’t something that we enjoy all that much. But it wasn’t too grotesque, by today’s standards. We first saw the show when we were given some MP4 recordings of the first season to watch, and we enjoyed them enough to get the complete set (see, sharing content with friends and family does lead to more profits for studios).
Although we found the ending of the series to be a little wishie-washie, it was enjoyable. However, it could have been flushed out a little more, but for whatever reason, the last season was only 13 episodes. So I guess they had to tie up loose ends fairly quickly.
Magnum P.I. is classic 1980s action-adventure television. Stories are pretty much wrapped up in 45 minutes, apart from the odd two-parter shows. But, as the series progresses, you get to deepen your understanding of the main characters and see the relationships between them develop. The most fun is seeing how such opposite people, like Magnum and Higgins, try to deal with one another.
The shows are really great, but now comes the bane of collecting DVDs, these darn stupid disc cases. Who the heck designs these things? This set, along with the Star Trek set I got for Christmas, have got to be the worst designed multi-disc sets I’ve ever seen. They arrange the discs so that you have to take out all of the discs to get to the one you want to watch, risking dropping them or putting finger prints all over them as you try to get the stupid things off of the cheap flimsy plastic spindles they put them on. It’s just so frustrating!
I mean, look at this thing:
Why can’t they just do the rational – and yet simpler thing – like the VEI people have done and just put the discs in a single sleeve, that you can easily flip through and access the disc you want to play? Look, it’s just so simple!
Yeah, I know, it’s all about making profits and cheapening out on us, the consumer. Scammers.
Oh well. I guess we’re just meant to ruin our disc collection so we can either go buy it again, or get so frustrated that we’ll move to streaming content. Well, that ain’t going to work on me. I’m working on a solution for our T.V. series DVDs that will fix all of this stupid boxed set shenanigans. More on that to come a little later.
