Black Books : The Complete First Series (Season for you americans)
Black Books is about a cranky, drunk Irishman named Bernard Black. He owns and runs a small new and used bookshoppe in england called Black Books. Bernard, for some odd reason, hates people coming into his shoppe to buy things. He is helped, most times to his frustration by his two, and I suspect only, friends, the oddball Manny, and the lady who runs the small knick-knack shoppe next door, Fran....who seems almost as odd as Bernard himself. Bernard says all the things we wish we could, if only we had the courage.
Bernard Black -
Fran - Tamsin Greig
Manny - Bill Bailey
Video : The show is in 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and anamorphic, so it'll fill your widescreen if you have one.
Video Quality : No artifacts that I could see. Having been made only 5 or six years ago, the picture is perfectly clear, with no distracting pops or lines that a lot of old movies/tv shows have.
Audio : The dvd has 2.0 Dolby Stereo for sound. It's a comedy series, so a 5.1 mix is far from necessary. This is perfect for me, since I only have a 2.0 setup and I don't have to worry about a 5.1 sound mix getting muddled through downconversion. The voices are at a good level, so you don't have to worry about hearing them. But, if you're unfamiliar with english or british shows, and aren't used to the accent, some of the english accents may be a bit hard to understand. Especially Bernard Blacks Irish accent. But I watch a lot of BBC shows and movies and other shows and movies about Ireland, Scotland, and england, so I could understand them for the most part.
Extras : Slightly less extras than I would have liked. It does have cast commentary by the three main characters on each of the six episodes. It's very funny, though most of the time, the commentary doesn't have much to do with the actual episode that's playing. The disc has a short outtakes reel that's really funny, though if you're not into english or british humour, you may not get some of it. There's a trailer for series 2 of the show as well as another trailer for a comedy show called Little Britain. There's a photo gallery from the show....but nobody really looks at those.
Equipment : I watched this on a 37" widescreen Sanyo HDTV and a tiny 13" White-Westinghouse television. I'd go for a big widescreen, if you can. The widescreen has just it's own speakers which are plain stereo and sound the best of tv speakers that I've ever heard. The other sound system that I watched the show with was the 2.0 Aiwa stereo that I've had for a few years. Even on the somewhat small speakers, the show sounded great. Though, the series not having any effects that would benefit from surround, it doesn't matter much,....
All in all, I'd recommend Black Books : The Complete 1st Series to any fan of british or english comedies. Especially if you like Fawlty Towers or Monty Python. It's a short season for a show, having only six episodes, but this isn't unusual for a britcom. Fawlty Towers, too, was a short series with 12 episodes in total.
