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The Sopranos: The Complete First Season
The Sopranos: The Complete First Season
- SOPRANOS
On January 10th, 1999, America was introduced to two families that would make history: The Soprano family headed by Tony Soprano, and The Soprano “family” headed by … Tony Soprano. ‘ ‘Four Stars! The first gotta-watch, gotta love, Gotti-like TV series of 1999. Across the board it’s an A-plus.’ ‘ – The New York Post ‘ ‘Achieves a fresh tone to match its irresistibly winning concept.’ ‘ – The New York TimesDVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Biographies
Featurette
Interviews
The Sopranos, writer-producer-director David Chase’s extraordinary television series, is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home: Like 1999’s other screen touchstone, American Beauty, the HBO series chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there’s the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own, nouveau riche brood. The series’ brilliant first season is built around
Rating: (out of 340 reviews)
List Price: $ 49.99
Price: $ 20.45
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Ari B. Domnitz
October 26, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Review by Ari B. Domnitz for The Sopranos: The Complete First Season
Rating:
On December 22, 2000, I recived the Sopranos First Season on DVD. It was a Birthday/Holiday gift form my girlfriend of 5 years. Over the course of the next week and a half, if there was any doubt of my whereabouts, it was a safe bet I was watching the next episonde. I am a 23 year old actor. My VHS collection numbers 350. My DVD collection a mere 20, however the Sopranos box set delivered more hours of riveting enjoyment than anything has in a long time. The show is, in my opinion a perfect blend of satire, drama, social comentary and fantastic story telling. Every person I introduce to the Sopranos is throughly impressed with all aspects of the series. On a personal note, I think James Gandolfini has finally given us something that Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino have long strived to achive. Gandolfini brings a familiarity to this roll that is one of the key elements to the show’s success. He has created a character that is not out of reach for the veiwing audience. Edie Falco and Nancie Marchand are also invaluable components to the creation of the overall feeling of accesability. While we may not all know what it is to have an AK-47 within arms reach, we do know what it is to have a nagging mother and a confused and judgmental spouse. The icing on the cake of this series is its supporting cast, the boys at the club and kids at home create an atmosphere that is simply tantilizing to the veiwing audience. I recomend this set to mafia fans and house wives alike. Get it for the gangster in you, after all…a hit is a hit.
Linda Linguvic
October 26, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Review by Linda Linguvic for The Sopranos: The Complete First Season
Rating:
I didn’t have HBO when The Sopranos came out in 1999, and so I am delighted that it is now on a set of DVD discs. I’m a big fan of books and movies about the Mafia and so I was prepared to love it. I must say that my expectations were all met, and more. There is nothing like being able to watch the series, in its entirety, all at once, at my own pace. And there is nothing like watching several video interviews and behind the scenes featurettes on the discs to enhance the viewing experience with background information. This series has won many awards. I can understand why.James Gandofini stars as Tony Soprano, a very human individual, who just happens to be a gangster. He’s living in modern times though, and so he’s plagued with depression and goes to a therapist, played by Lorraine Bracco. Tony’s domestic scenes, which include his wife, Edie Falco, his daughter, Jamie-Lyn Sigler, his son, Robert Iler, and – especially his mother, Nancy Marchand, are all unique and slightly off-center examples of brilliant writing and editing. Add to this his criminal activities and his violent temper, and there’s a mix that fascinates me completely.One of the delights of the series is that I can’t quite figure what will happen next. I’m constantly on edge as I watch the story unfold, and there are always surprises. I like the humor and the irreverence. And best of all I like the fact that each episode is commercial free and a complete movie in itself. I love it when the scenes move back and forth between the actual crime stuff and his family life. And I love the humanity that Tony exhibits. In a way he is “everyman” as he struggles with decisions and hard choices in his life. And yet, he is larger than life, and a bit of a hero to our culture. Couple this with really fine acting and an excellent script, and a winner emerges.I’m not into dream sequences and these were the only parts that dragged down the action, but there were only a very few throughout all the episodes. However, now that I look back on it, I’m glad they were there, because even though I was annoyed with them at the time, I can now see how they really helped develop the characters. These on-target characterizations are what drive the series and make it soar above its nearest competitors. The Sopranos on DVD is a winner in every sense of the world. And it is not only recommended for aficionados of the gangster genre. It gets my highest recommended for everyone.
R.D. Monsoon
October 26, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Review by R.D. Monsoon for The Sopranos: The Complete First Season
Rating:
The Blu-ray version of Season 1 boasts significant video quality improvements over the 2000 DVD release.
Season 1 used a grainier film stock than subsequent seasons. This was problematic for the 2000 DVD release because MPEG II encoding has a difficult time handling grain, HBO squeezed 4 episodes onto each discs (except the last one) resulting in a high level of compression, there was a lot of edge enhancement applied to the video, and that this was a relatively early DVD release — MPEG II encoding has significantly improved since then. As a result, the video on the DVDs had a lot of artifacts — and the larger the TV you have, the more obtrusive the artifacts and edge enhancement are.
The Blu-ray release pretty much fixes all of those problems. You can really see the difference in the closeups on the actors’ faces. The image is clear with a film texture. You’ll also notice a lot more details in the background.
The pilot episode doesn’t look as good as the rest of the season. This is no doubt because a cheaper film stock was used and they had less time to light scenes due to it being a pilot. The rest of the episodes look uniformly excellent.
Don’t expect the show to look quite as good as good as the HD broadcasts of the later seasons. Starting in Season 2 much more money and effort was put into the cinematography in order to give the show a feature film look. The interiors of Season 1 are typically slightly over lit with a soft white light. I suspect this was done because they had a shorter production schedule then later Seasons when the show was a hit, and they didn’t have time to relight sets every time they moved the camera.
The packaging is virtually identical to the DVD box. HBO has wisely decided to spread the season across 5 discs — no more than 3 episodes per disc. This minimizes compression and helps improve video quality.
Nothing to report about the sound. Like the DVDs, the surround sound channels only come to life during explosions and shoot outs.
Fans of the show will be very happy with the results.
Nicole Hamilton
October 26, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Review by Nicole Hamilton for The Sopranos: The Complete First Season
Rating:
I’d been hearing about The Sopranos all last year but honestly, I just never have time to catch a series every week. I just don’t watch TV with any regularity and I’m not crazy about missing episodes or seeing them out of order when I know there’s continuity. When I saw that whole first season of The Sopranos was coming out, I figured that would be just right for me.I wasn’t disappointed. Matter of fact, I was blown away. It’s a great show, at times hysterical, at times very dark. The characters are sometimes over the top but they stay close to basic story, unlike a lot of shows where, struggling to fill 60 minutes and having run out of any sensible ideas, they’ll have doctors from an ER show caught in an improbable plane crash in the Andes or whatever.The most interesting thing for me is the way they’ve used Tony Soprano’s sessions with his therapist as a way to stitch everything together and let you get inside Tony’s head. The actors playing both Tony and the therapist turn in remarkable and very believable performances.This set is also a heck of a bargain. You get 13 episodes, four per DVD, plus some bonus materials, which is a lot of viewing time for the money.I recommend this set as easily the best DVD purchase I made all year (this from someone who buys nearly everything that comes out.)