NYPD Blue Season 8

DVD Wholesale Quick Overview:

Took a few bucks off the price since I ordered it in October, same as they did when I ordered Season 7. But Shout Factory seems to be easing these things out with an eye on how many sell each time. I’d hoped that Season 9 was coming out in April or May, but I went over to the Shout Factory site and found a discussion board where several users expressed that hope. Only to find out that someone on their staff–he was using an official-looking Shout Factory avatar anyway–said (and this is important); “WE DON’T HAVE THE RIGHTS TO ANY SEASONS BEYOND SEASON 8”. At least one other user replied with the question; “Then why don’t you buy the rights?” The silence was deafening on that.

Be that as it may, Shout Factory’s menu format beats the original 20th Century Fox format found on Seasons 1-4. Those early seasons have a weird format in which each episode on a given disc is on its own sub-page visible on the menu, each even with its own music. To move between them takes forever! Unlike the way Shout Factory has done it the old-fashioned way with these latter seasons, so if for example you want to watch the third episode on some disc, you just arrow down to it the way normal multi-feature discs have it.

So here’s what I did on those last four seasons. There have been Region 2 editions of at least the missing seasons, including the four that Shout Factory did up. So I went over to the UK page and ordered them in a bunch and tacked on an entry-level Sony player. One of those doesn’t even cost what two of these series sets costs, as long as you don’t insist on HDMI. And with most of my components having HDMI I’ve got plenty of RCA imputs on my TV. You have to chase down a UK to US power plug converter for that weird wall plug the unit has, though. There’s even a currency conversion function on this site, plus nowadays you can even find links to those missing seasons, marked as “imports”. And as you can see on the US page, nowadays there are links to all of the missing seasons (9-12) in the region 2 format that the UK page carries. Now if only somebody like Shout Factory would pick up the rights to those final 4 seasons so that fans don’t have to pick up that spare region 2 player like I did to see them. Come on already–this is an award-winning series, not some also-ran that they bring in during the summer months.

-R. L. MILLER

DVD Wholesale Main Features:

Actors: Dennis Franz, Gordon Clapp, Bill Brochtrup, Kim Delaney, Henry Simmons
Format: Box set, Color, Full Screen, NTSC, Widescreen
Language: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)
Number of discs: 5
Rated: NR-Not Rated
Studio: Shout! Factory
DVD Release Date: January 13, 2015
Run Time: 960 minutes
ASIN: B00OAIHIQC