TVSquad

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

Wow, this is quite a week for TV fans of all types. You can get the complete series sets for The Sopranos and I Dream of Jeannie, and anniversary sets for such TV classics as The Cosby Show and The Long Ranger. I even see a season 2 set for Mister Peepers! I didn't even know there was a season 1 set already released, so I'll have to look into that.

The Studio One anthology is a real gem, and I'll have a review of it later this week.

• 7th Heaven - Season 7
• Band of Brothers - Miniseries (Blu-Ray)
• Chuck - Season 1 (Blu-Ray)
• The Cosby Show - 25th Anniversary
• Father Knows Best - Season 2
• Firefly - Complete Series (Blu-Ray)
• I Dream of Jeannie - Complete Series
• Little House on the Prairie - Complete Series
• The Lone Ranger - 75th Anniversary
• M Squad - Complete Series

If you need one example as to how 1950s television was different than 2000s television, here it is: this show ran for three years and they made 117 episodes.

This is a complete set in the most literal of ways. It has every single episode of the show, and they got them not just by digging into studio archives but by also asking fans for help. This set was originally going to be a "best of" set because they didn't have all of the episodes. But fans actually filled in the gaps with episodes that they had on tape for one reason or another. So now this is truly a set that was "completed." So you get to see every episode of a show that was rather groundbreaking.

And you also get to see where the cult classic Police Squad! got a lot of its structure.

It's great that recent shows we love, whether it's Mad Men or Seinfeld or The Sopranos, get released on DVD so we can watch every episode again any time that we want. But the true greatness of the DVD technology is that we get to see shows that we've never seen before, because we were too young to watch them when they first aired and they're not rerun in syndication like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners.

The latest show to be released - and getting the Complete Series treatment! - is M Squad, a black and white detective series from the late 50s that starred Lee Marvin as a Chicago undercover cop. The set will include 15 discs, 14 that will house the episodes of the show and another disc that will feature the show's music. What's most interesting about this release is that at first it was supposed to be only a Very Best Of set, because the studio didn't have all of the episodes. They sent out a plea to fans and collectors to see if they had a copy of any missing episodes on videotape, and the fans came through. So now it's a Complete Series set and not just a Very Best Of.

The set will be released on September 23.