Designing Women: The Final Season (Season Seven/1992 – 1993/Shout! Factory DVD Set)/Designing Women: Twenty Timeless Classics (Shout! Factory DVD Set)/Jodi Picoult Collection (Lifetime telefilms/New Video DVDs)/Madame Bovary (2000 telefilm/BBC DVD)/The Note III (2011/Sony DVD)/Surviving High School (Lifetime telefilms/New Video DVDs)/Touched By An Angel: The Fifth Season (1998 – 1999/CBS DVD Set)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+ (Angel: C)     Extras: D (Bovary: C+)     Main Programs: C-/C/D/C+/D/C-/D

 

 

I miss the days of more progressive television where the female characters were more realistic and their situations innovative and interesting.  Looking at this latest cycle of newer female-centered shows, they usually range from poor to outright regressive and far too safe.

 

 

When it began, Designing Women was more progressive and smart than it might have sometimes got credit for, but by its Final Season (aka Season Seven/1992 – 1993), the show had kept making cast changes and it finally caught up with the show.  This time, Judith Ivey succeeded Julia Duffy, who had just replaced one of the two original cast members the season before.  Though she can act, it was just one too many changes like say, the original Charlie’s Angels and the show lost its edge altogether, seeming at this point like an odd imitation of the original show.

 

They still managed to make 22 more half hours (here on 4 DVDs) and at least this is available for completists, but as someone who was not the biggest fan of the show to begin with, this was the end of the road and they folded rightly with nowhere else to go.  About the time this set was announced, Shout! Factory issued a handy Designing Women: Twenty Timeless Classics DVD Set with some of the best episodes of the show.  Not bad, but I would just recommend getting each season starting with the first and going from there.  Also, maybe these will be issued on Blu-ray, but we’ll see.  Still, I would put up with a show that was at least progressive to begin with than TV programming that was not.  Neither set has any extras.

 

 

The Jodi Picoult Collection from Lifetime has three middling, poor telefilms in Salem Falls with James Van Der Beek (older male teacher accused of being with younger sexy student(s)), Plain Truth with Mariska Hargitay (attorney defends Amish child (again?)) and The Pact with Megan Mullally (two teens create a dumb suicide pact and unaware parents have to deal with consequences).

 

I found none of these well made or well done, despite the efforts of the respective casts, these are just flat, safe, predictable and to be honest, often idiot plot tales that remind us of how TV movies have been killed by 1980s mediocrity.  There are surprisingly no extras, for what would anyone have to say about these?

 

 

Though not the best version of the story (and we have only covered an opera version before), the 2000 BBC telefilm of Madame Bovary is at least competent if flat with Frances O’Connor and Hugh Bonneville co-starring in a respectable variant that tells the story in the most book-like direct ways instead of trying to take the material anywhere fresh, but the actors make sense together as in a story about a woman so bored by her marriage that she starts to sleep around at a time when that was less acceptable, did we have to feel like we were sometimes as stuck too?

 

The only extra is a featurette called A Complete Heart: Gustavo Flaubert, about the author of the original book and the best extra of any release on this list.

 

 

The Note III (2011) subtitled “Notes from the Heart Healer” (I didn’t know my heart was damaged!) is the shocking third telefilm out of what was the silly first Note (reviewed elsewhere on this site, we missed the second) and has Genie Francis (likeable) and Ted McGinley (likeable enough, though his he a comic or dramatic actor?) as the couple who has an abandoned baby left with them when they are on vacation.  She is a help columnist, so imagine this happening to her?

 

OK.  I believe she could write such columns, but this is contrived from the get go and then her husband (yikes) has some secret past and this starts out problematic, landing up so convoluted that it might have been an unintentional howler if this were not about a baby.  This series should be cancelled like the telegram, because it is running out of things to say and do as if it had any to do to begin with.

 

Extras include Deleted Scenes that would not have helped and a featurette about the leads.

 

 

Yet another collection of Lifetime telefilms is here in the Surviving High School DVD set.  This time we have Odd Girl Out with Alexa Vega (a bullying story that rings very phony), Augusta, Gone (a 15 year old female becomes a drunk and addict, also not ringing true in the way it is written and directed), The Perfect Teacher (spoiled female student tries to blackmail teacher into sex; somewhat convincing at first at least) and For One Night with Raven-Symoné (African American students break long standing prom segregation, but has teleplay that ignores the Civil Rights context in disturbing ways) resulting in four tales that do not resemble any high school now of decades ago.  At least I survived watching them without going into a coma, but there are no extras.

 

 

Finally, last and least, is Touched By An Angel: The Fifth Season (1998 – 1999) which manages to be worse than earlier seasons by being ultra-smug about its religious views and worldviews to the point that I could not believe how shrill and even angry the show really was, smiles not hiding a thing.  The pompousness of the 27 hour-long shows here (over seven DVDs) took me by surprise because I have only watched (been able to stand) so much of this show and only previously covered the first half of Season Three (elsewhere on this site) so I continue to be baffled by its success, except to say there are more angry, self-righteous religious people out there than I thought.  Maybe co-star Della Reese was mad about not getting all the money she deserved, but I’ll pas on asking and there are no extras.

 

 

The 1.33 X 1 image on the Women and Angels sets (three here in all) were shot on 35mm film, but finished on professional analog NTSC video and are exceptionally soft as a result.  The various aspect ratios on the Lifetime sets (1.33 X 1, letterboxed 1.78 X 1) tend to be generic and soft whether they were made in Canada or not, so they all disappoint.  That leaves the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Note and Bovary which are also about as soft and not really better than the rest, but at least have slightly better color, but not enough to rate higher.

 

The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on all the DVDs are simple stereo at best and play better than their images do, save Angel, which sounds a generation down for some reason or might not have been recorded that well to begin with.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo