Earlier this year, Here's Lucy -- the first season of Lucille Ball's third sitcom classic following I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show -- was released on DVD. On November 3, MPI Home Video is releasing season two.
The TV on DVD business is far enough along for distributors to make this standard operating procedure instead of playing dollar games with customers. Other shows such as Bewitched (distributed by Sony), Friends (distributed by NBC Studios), The Cosby Show (distributed by UrbanWorks) and Everybody Loves Raymond (distributed by HBO Home Video) were similarly released at a rate of about two per year until each series was available in their entirety.
Shortly after the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in May of 2008, Twentieth Century Fox committed to releasing the final three seasons of the 1970s sitcom classic. Instead, plans were made to release the ENTIRE series despite the fact that many fans already owned the first four seasons -- the last of which came out in 2006 followed by an unnecessary four-season bundle in 2008. Fans were outraged and the fifth season will be available October 6.
Still Waiting for New Seasons of All in the Family, The Jeffersons
New seasons of the groundbreaking All in the Family and its spinoff The Jeffersons haven't been released since 2007. During that time an unnecessary season 1-6 bundle of All in the Family was made available. Despite fan's request for the release of subsequent seasons, Sony (ironically the same group that handled the Bewitched season releases so well) put out an even more unnecessary fan favorites edition of both series on September 29.
Once a series' first season is granted DVD treatment, consumers expect the same for all seasons of that series and there should be a committment by the studios and the distributors to fulfill those expectations. Fans of 227 (distributed by Sony), Murphy Brown (distributed by Warner), A Different World (distributed by UrbanWorks) and Living Single (distibuted by Warner) have inexplicably had to wait more than three years for either of these popular classics to have a second season. Some may cite poor sales of each show's first season, but one would imagine consumer demand for that show had already been gauged prior to the inital release. There are feedback forums and message boards full of valuable insight into consumers' interest in additional season releases.
Consumers Wait Too Long for Series Releases on DVD
The business of TV on DVD is an already-established and very easily maintained relationship between distributor and consumer. Consumers simply want their favorite past and present TV shows made available season by season in a timely fashion at an affordable price as full sets (instead of being criminally split into volumes in the same manner Paramount has done with My Three Sons).
If not, distributors need to be prepared to explain themselves to their consumers. It may just be business for some distributors but their consumers also want to leave the bargaining table happy.
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