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Managing Editor Create your own summer re-runs with these two new DVD sets. Medium: The First Complete Season In the wake of The X Files, there have been many television series that have had paranormal or supernatural themes, but few of them have clicked. Medium has been an exception. The first season of this NBC series is now on DVD and if you're a fan of the show there are plenty of extras to convince you to purchase it. If you're not a fan, but enjoy a television series with a twist, medium is well worth discovering. Patricia Arquette plays Alison DuBois, wide, mother, and law student who is struggling with what some might call a gift, while others call a curse: she has both the powers of a psychic and a medium. She literally sees dead people. And these dead people have issues that they hope DuBois can help resolve. When she offered her services to a local district attorney, he is both skeptical and intrigued her information is too good. Each episode is essentially a murder mystery, but the show is much more. At its heart is the story of a marriage and family that must adjust to circumstances that few face. The scenes between DuBois and her husband are as compelling and entertaining as anything else in the show. What makes the series even more interesting is that there is a real Alison Dubois, a best-selling and controversial author of two books about her alleged conversations with the dead. The series does draw quite a bit from her life, although in the interview that is part of the DVD extras Dubois said that no case she has worked on is represented in the series. Although there are plenty of people who dispute the claims of the real Alison Dubois, I think most people would enjoy the stories of fictional counterpart. The five-disc set has a number of behind-the-scenes documentaries and an extended version of the pilot of the show. Strangers With Candy: The Complete Series This half-hour parody of those well meaning by preachy after school specials from the 1970s and '80s was the first original non-skit show from Comedy Central. Since its debut in 1999, the cable channel has run through quite a bit of programming, but Strangers, which lasted 30 episodes over three years, still packs a comic punch. Amy Sedaris stars as Jerri Blank, a 46 year-old "boozer, user and loser" who decides to pick up her life where she left it when she ran away from home during her freshman year in high school. In each half-hour Blank has to grapple with some great truth about herself and learn a valuable lesson. For example, these lessons involve Blank understanding that it's wrong to use her knowledge of making drugs to be popular with her schoolmates and that caring for a baby means you can't just leave it at the playground when you're tired of it. This is funny, but very dark stuff and is not for everyone. There is a new Strangers With Candy feature that will be released this summer, and I'm sure this set was released to help support the film. Extras include a preview of the new feature, an interview with the series creators at The Museum of Radio and Television and the show's pilot that was never aired. |
