Warner Home Video The Wire: The Complete Series [DVD] [2008] & The Sopranos: The Complete Series [DVD] [2007]

The Wire: The Complete Series [DVD] [2008] Note: This DVD is designed to be played at an aspect ratio of 4:3. The Wire Complete Box Set comes packaged in a black sleeve featuring all 60 episodes re-mastered on 24 discs. With special features including audio commentaries with writer/creator David Simon, director Clarke Johnson and writer George Pelacanos, Q&A sessions with the cast and crew and an hour long "behind the scenes" documentary. One of television's most critically acclaimed programmes, The Wire addresses the seedy side of Baltimore’s finest looking into money, drugs, politics and murder. Told from the point of view of both the police and their targets, the series captures a universe of subterfuge and surveillance, where easy distinctions between good and evil, and crime and punishment, are challenged at every turn. A study on urban life in one of America’s toughest cities, each season of The Wire has focused on a different aspect of Baltimore, starting with the police force and the drug trade, then moving on to City Hall, the education system and concluding with the media. The Sopranos: The Complete Series [DVD] [2007] Watch all episodes of writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary US television series. The Sopranos is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home, chronicling a dysfunctional, suburban family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own, nouveau riche brood. The series' first season was built around what Tony learns when, whipsawed between those two worlds, he finds himself plunged into depression and seeks psychotherapy--a gesture at odds with his mid-level machismo, yet instantly recognizable as a modern emotional test. With analysis built into the very spine of the show's elaborate episodic structure, creator Chase and his formidable team of directors, writers and actors weave an unpredictable series of parallel and intersecting plot arcs that twist from tragedy to farce to social realism throughout six spellbinding series. While created for a smaller screen, they enjoy a far larger canvas than a single movie would afford, and the results, like the very best episodic television, attain a richness and scope far closer to a novel than movies normally get. Alternately seductive, exasperated, fearful, and murderous, James Gandolfini's Tony is utterly convincing, even when executing brutal shifts between domestic comedy and dramatic violence.