Breaking Bad: The Complete Second Season (Sony) – The second season of the skewed cable crime drama about a meek middle class high school chemistry teacher who takes up a new career as a crystal meth cook and aspiring drug kingpin shakes up his life—and his moral equilibrium—even more. Walter White is one of the most fascinating characters on television, a once-promising research chemist who gave up his Nobel Prize dreams and ambitions to take care of his wife (Anna Gunn) and son, mired in the disappointments of his unfulfilling career as he fights terminal lung cancer and throws caution to the wind to build up a financial stake for his family before he dies. Now this one-time retiring fellow faces violent drug dealers, rivals and an investigation by the FBI (led by his own brother-in-law), not to mention the fatal inexperience of his drug-addict partner (Aaron Paul), a small-time dealer trying to play in the big leagues.

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston

Written and created by X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan, the show has a wicked sense of humor and a bleak sense of disappointment. In a strange way, this dangerous new lifestyle gives White an indomitability and daring that he never had before and his new life burns with an intensity that he’s missed all these years. All it costs him is an ethical equilibrium. Bryan Cranston won Best Actor Emmy Awards for the second year running as White, making the character both vulnerable and fearless as he crosses moral lines with every step up to the big time. The transformation riveting and haunting: we can’t help but like and care for this guy, thanks to Cranston’s very human and at times comic performance, even as he loses his humanity and becomes less sympathetic to the lives that get chewed up in his wake. 13 episodes on four DVDs or three Blu-ray discs, each with commentary on four episodes (including the first and final episodes of the season), plus deleted scenes, webisodes and a lot of short promotional featurettes. Exclusive to Blu-ray is “The Writers’ Lab: An Interactive Guide to the Elements of an Episode.”

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Think of the lighthearted eighties spy series Scarecrow & Mrs. King: The Complete First Season (Warner) as a Hitchcock lark of an American innocent caught up in the machinations of Cold War shenanigans, all relocated to the eighties-era suburbia of network TV. At least that’s what the pilot episode aspires to. Dashing American agent Lee Stetson (Bruce Boxleitner), aka Scarecrow, on the run from deadly foreign agents drops a package in the hands of Amanda King (Kate Jackson). Suddenly this divorced mother of two and busy soccer mom in the suburbs of Washington D.C. is thrust into the world of international espionage and Stetson’s mission gets hopelessly tangled with this civilian’s life.

Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson

I can just hear the pitch: He’s a slick playboy, she’s the mom next door. He’s charming and worldly, she’s chatty and practical. She dotes on him and, despite himself, he becomes quite fond of her. Especially since his boss decides she’s just the stabilizing influence this risk-taking solo agent needs and drafts her help as a freelance operative whenever they need believable cover in “the real world.” Which, it turns out, is practically every week. Meanwhile she keeps her double life a secret from her mother (Beverly Garland, forever trying to get her remarried), her grade-school sons and her (unseen) dates. It’s hard to call the growing affection between them as romantic tension, but there is a slow build and couple of near-kisses (always interrupted by the timely arrival of a suspect or a world-shaking crisis) to string the viewers along to the next season of their very low-key flirtation.

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Kurt Russell is the King in Elvis (1979) (Shout! Factory), John Carpenter’s 1979 TV movie, which charts the rise of Elvis Presley from Memphis rockabilly phenomenon to rock and roll superstar to his phoenix-like comeback as a Vegas showman, but keeps the focus on the man behind the iconic image. Russell’s effortless impression captures the voice and cadence and physicality of Elvis without tipping into impersonation. He delivers the unbridled energy and musical passion that the young Elvis unleashed in every performance while allowing us to see then man in the bubble offstage, trapped by the very success that has made his fame and fortune. Carpenter, meanwhile, puts the dramatic focus on the relationships and tricky social dynamic with the male friends who became Elvis support group and entourage. It’s the first collaboration between Carpenter and Russell and it remains the most perceptive of Elvis biopics.

Kurt Russell is Elvis - thank you very much

Elvis impersonator Ronnie McDowell provides the singing voice and Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle and Joe Mantegna co-star. Trivia note: the film is written and produced by Anthony Lawrence, who earlier wrote three of the silliest of Elvis musicals back in the sixties. This is the DVD debut of this superb made-for TV production and the first time that the complete 170-minute production that has been available in any form for decades. Includes the featurette “Bringing A Legend To Life” featuring archival interviews with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter, commentary by vocalist Ronnie McDowell and author Edie Hand (who co-authored a handful of Elvis recipe books) and rare performance clips from “American Bandstand” among the supplements.

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G.B.H. (Acorn) is a savage satire of Thatcher-era party politics, a devastating drama of power and corruption and simple moral courage, and the best piece of dramatic television I’ve seen all year. Sure, it’s from 1991 and is perfectly reflective of its time, but it is so well written that the characters and conflicts haven’t aged a bit.

Robert Lindsay and Lindsay Duncan in "G.B.H."

The brilliant British mini-series, written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Robert Young, stars Robert Lindsay as ferociously ambitious and fiercely vengeful Labour Party politician Michael Murray, who has just been swept into power in a small industrial city with the help of old-school socialists who have their own agenda. Murray is a working class guy ready to use his newfound power to take revenge on everyone who ever wronged him along the way and Lindsay plays him as both a cunning opportunist and a man whose identification with the disenfranchised ultimately sets him in opposition with his Socialist supporters. Michael Palin takes a rare dramatic role as Jim Nelson, the compassionate headmaster of a school for special needs children who lands in his crosshairs when he defies a citywide strike to care for his students. “I’m here to tell you that if you screw up this day, I’ll screw up the rest of your life!” promises Murray, and he proceeds to make it happen. Palin brings a heartfelt warmth to a fragile but morally firm Nelson, who uses humor to cover vulnerability and fear. It’s heartbreaking to see such bullying happen to such an honest and dedicated man with such an emotional fragility and crippling anxiety.

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Shakespeare’s King Lear (Omnibus) (E1) is stripped down to a fleet 70 minutes for this landmark live TV event, staged for the prestigious CBS series Omnibus in 1953. Peter Brook, then the phenom director of British stage, was brought in to stage this production for the cameras, Virgil Thompson wrote a minimalist underscore and Orson Welles (not even 40 years old at the time) was brought in as the aged Lear, his theatrical stature still of some name value even if his marquee was not. This presentation, which was (after the introduction by host Alistair Cooke) played straight through without commercials on its original broadcast, is so whittled down that it feels almost abstracted from the play. Brook prepared this version specifically for TV, chopping out subplots and cutting away on secondary characters to focus on the deterioration of Lear. So while the slow build of the sisters’ schemes comes on pretty fast here, the slide of Lear into madness takes on a momentum that is thrilling. Arnold Moss channels the great profile and theatrical dignity of John Barrymore as the Duke of Albany as he becomes appalled at the scheme he has been a part of and Micheal MacLiammoir (surely brought in with the blessing, if not the urging, of Welles, who had just cast him as Iago in his film of Othello) is a deft Poor Tom, who brings a little soul to the tragedy with his wit and his loyalty.

Orson Welles is King Lear

There’s a reason that this production has stood the test of time: while it suffers in many ways as a Shakespeare adaptation, it also shows the possibilities of TV to combine theater and cinema with the intimacy inherent in TV, and the expressionist solutions to production challenges of live TV and multiple sets needed for such a production. Brook moves the production from the formal throne rooms and banquet halls of the royal castles to more expressionist locales created with the limitations of TV in mind: a storm on the heath on a bare hill of artfully windswept grass against a simple black cloth, the rickety gears of an ancient windmill in which Lear and his loyal followers take refuge, the abstracted suggestions of tents on a sketch of a beachhead. The sets become increasingly alienated and despairing as they get more stylized and expressionistic and lighting adds to the dark night of the soul with slashes of illumination and beams of shadows falling across the cast. Andrew McCullough directs the television portion with a visual sensibility beyond anything that was being done in live TV at the time, anticipating the dynamic staging and effective use of extreme close-ups that directors like John Frankenheimer would bring to live TV.

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Doctor Who: The Complete Specials (BBC) – There was a noticeable grumble among Doctor Who fans when Christopher Eccleston left the role after a single season and the Doctor was reborn in the fun-loving, hyper-animated persona of David Tennant. There’s no question that Tennant made the part his own in his four years with the character, just as producer Russell T. Davies brought a whole new energy and sensibility to the iconic series with his 21^st century reboot. And with both Tennant and Davies leaving the series, they decided to give the fans something very special by way of farewell and followed the fourth season with five hour-long “specials” (well, four actually, but one of them was broken into two separate parts and comes that way on disc). These shows take what was inherent in this incarnation of the Doctor and finally, fatefully transform the last of the Time Lords from happy-go-lucky time- and space-traveler into a tragic hero on a collision course with destiny and a death foretold.

David Tennant faces The End of Time

The adventuresome Planet of the Dead (with Michelle Ryan) and the melancholy The Next Doctor (with David Morrissey) have already appeared separately on DVD and Blu-ray. The rest debut this week, separately or in DVD and Blu-ray box sets. The Waters of Mars, starring Lindsay Duncan as the leader of an Earth colony on Mars, is an invasion thriller that puts the Doctor in the heartbreaking position of putting compassion up against the laws of time and space that he considers immutable. Under the spring-loaded energy and snappy repartee that gives The Doctor his goofy amiability and lighthearted lift, Tennant layers in a note of anguish that is fully brought forth in the two-part The End of Time (titles don’t come more epic than that). And they outdo themselves on The End of Time, which delves into the mystery of the Time Lords (check out Timothy Dalton as narrator and rogue Time Lord), spins an apocalyptic showdown like you’ve never seen (John Simm as the Time Master, a madman with seemingly unlimited power to transform himself into… well, something epic) and ends with a touching farewell tour of the lives the Doctor has touched in his current incarnation before his inevitable transformation. It’s a touching and deserved farewell to one of the finest incarnations of The Doctor. Each of the specials runs just under an hour except for The End of Time, Part Two, which runs over to give the Doctor time to say farewell to everyone.

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Critics apparently have been won over by Southland: The Complete First Season (Warner). Me, not so much. Promoted as a brave, new, uncompromising police drama when it debuted on NBC last season, this production from Ann Biderman and John Wells focuses on various levels of law enforcement in a single Los Angeles precinct, from uniformed officers to various grades of detectives. A pair of patrolmen center the series—veteran officer Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) who takes his responsibilities seriously as he mentors rookie Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie), a rich kid trying to make a difference—but it’s an ensemble show with plenty of drama to go around. Regina King is the bleeding heart of the force as the detective who makes every case personal and whose dedication has taken a toll on her personal life, Tom Everett Scott is her more sardonic partner, a married man and father of three struggling with a failing marriage, and Kevin Alejandro, Arija Bareikis, Shawn Hatosy and Michael McGrady fill out the ensemble.

Ben McKenzie and Michael Cudlitz

Creator Ann Biderman is an NYPD Blue veteran and John Wells produced Third Watch, and the show is reminiscent of both in its attempt to combine a dramatic realism in terms of character and documentary snapshot of working on the streets and in the squad room. The focus is less on the cases and more on the stress that the job puts on the member of the force, from broken relationships and failing families to drug and alcohol abuse, and the season ends on a particularly devastating emotional breakdown. Even the scrupulously by-the-book Cooper, a man with an aphorism for every occasion, has problems with painkillers. But for all the integrity and good intentions, it doesn’t redefine the cop drama as much as it thinks it does. A lot of people like show, but I didn’t connect with the characters or their stories in any compelling way.

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The most savage legal series on TV, Damages launched on FX in 2007 with Glenn Close running the show as Patty Hewes, the alpha wolf of New York’s high-priced attorneys. Hewes walked away from that very eventful season with a huge win in her class action lawsuit against arrogant millionaire CEO Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson) and a failed murder attempt against her newest hire, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), and Close walked away with an Emmy for Best Actress (one of the show’s three awards). Damages: The Complete Second Season (Sony) picks up in the wake of those events, with Ellen now working as an informant for the FBI’s efforts to put Patty away and Patty looking for the right case to follow up the win that made her the superstar of New York litigators. This season features what is arguably the most impressive cast on television, including William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Timothy Olyphant, Ted Danson, Mario Van Peebles, Darryl Hammond, and Clarke Peters and John Doman of The Wire. Hurt is old friend and professional colleague Daniel Purcell, who comes to Patty with hints of a corporate conspiracy and then becomes a client when he’s the prime suspect in the murder of his wife, Gay Harden is the corporate litigator who takes on Patty and Olyphant is a member of Ellen’s support group with his own secrets.

Glenn Close rules the room as Patty Hewes

Close plays Patty with a cold cunning and unapologetic ego—she plays to win and she doesn’t seem to care who gets chewed up in the process—while Hurt keeps us guessing at Purcell’s motives and allegiances when he double-crosses Patty on the stand at a time he’s supposed to be a friendly witness against the corporation that seems to have corrupted him as well. Everyone is playing an angle here and you can’t trust anyone, not even the FBI or the EPA, which keeps the audience off balance through the thirteen-episode story. And as in the first season, they almost never step into a courtroom. Forget courtroom theatrics and dramatic summation speeches to the jury, this all about behind the scenes machinations and hardball tactics of legal gamesmanship.

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I’m something of a closet junkie for ABC Family Channel shows and Make It or Break It: Volume One (Disney), a series focused on four female teenage gymnasts competing to land a spot on the American Olympic team, is a perfect illustration of why. On the surface it looks like a spin-off of the (criminally underrated) film Stick It, right down to the working-class girl, Emily (Chelsea Hobbs), who is brought in from Fresno (where she trained at the YMCA) to the nationally-rated Rocky Mountain Gymnastics Training Center (aka The Rock) in Boulder and becomes the odd girl out among the daughters of the ambitious and affluent. But it’s not about rebellion so much as issues facing all teenagers, in particular teenage girls, exacerbated by the stress of training and struggle and the pressures of expectations in a rarified culture of national competition, and each of the four girls at the core of the team embodies the conflicts and challenges: Emily, the tough girl with a single mom with the best intentions and epic bad decisions; Payson (Ayla Kell), the team superstar who has sacrificed everything to gymnastics (even as her supportive parents wish she would sometimes just have some fun); Lauren (Cassie Scerbo), the bitchy rich girl who sees Emily as a threat and backstabs even her best friends to secure her spot on the team; and Kaylie (Josie Loren), the daughter of a pro athlete who pushes her to succeed when she would be happy just to be like other girls.

Chelsea Hobbs, Josie Loren and Cassie Scerbo

There’s a whole soap opera of emotional crises spread across the girls and the families of their orbits but true to the channel’s focus, it’s all about being a teenage girl. The ten episodes of this two-disc set, which take them through the collapse and rebuilding of the team under a new coach and the march to the Junior Nationals in Boston, make up the first half of the debut season (which resumes this week on cable). The set also includes the featurette “Making It” (the young stars discuss balancing the physical demand of the role with the performance) and deleted scenes. The new season has just begun on ABC Family Channel.

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Big Love: The Complete Third Season (HBO) – You’ve got to have big love when you’re juggling three wives in suburbia. True Blood may be HBO’s reigning cult series, but this complicated drama of big love, bigger family and a skewed yet impassioned perspective on family values remains the most interesting and involving show on the premium cable channel. Bill Pullman is Mormon businessman Bill Henrickson, a practicing polygamist with three dedicated wives (elder wife Jeanne Tripplehorn, problem middle wife Chloe Sevigny, and youngest Ginnifer Goodwin) and seven surprisingly well-adjusted children in adjoining houses in a suburban Salt Lake City neighborhood.

Welcome to the Family: "Big Love"

In past seasons they’ve been careful to hide the true nature of their arrangement from their more traditional neighbors but secrets have a tendency to leak out. That’s one of the reasons that Bill decides to branch out the family business into gambling and gaming: while a polygamy scandal could tarnish the family-friendly reputation of their appliance and building supplies stores, it’s no big deal in the casino business. But there are always complications and this season they involve the government’s case against self-proclaimed prophet and former compound leader Roman (Harry Dean Stanton), Bill’s nemesis and the dark face of Mormon fundamentalism, and the way he manipulates his daughter (and Bill’s second wife) to infiltrate the prosecution office and sabotage the case. What I’ve always appreciated about the show is the balance between individuals searching for their own identities while unequivocally devoted to family and protective of all of its members, no matter what their conflicted emotions or conflicted loyalties. The final episode of the third season reminds us once again that family is about inclusiveness, forgiveness and acceptance, and it does so with touching conviction. Ten episodes on four discs, plus a trio of three-minute webisodes, which make nice but inconsequential grace notes to the show proper, and four promotional featurettes promoted as bonus “Their Stories So Far” monologues. The new season begins this Sunday and I can’t wait.

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Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series (Universal) – Yes, I’m aware that this oddly designed box set is not new this season. It was actually released in the summer but I only received it while working on the MSN “Best of 2009″ DVD and Blu-ray list. And while it didn’t make the list, it’s one of the best TV shows of the decade and, for all the issues with the packaging, still the best way to get the entire show in one cost-effective swoop.

Battlestar Galactica

Forget the original clunky, kitschy 1980s sci-fi series. This series is more than a revival, it’s a creative, clever, and compelling rethinking of the show. The drama about the human survivors of an intergalactic massacre on a deep space wagon train search for the mythical plant Earth is reborn with a new generation of Cylons (a robot race originally created by humans who declare war on their creators) and a fascinating new command dynamic. In place of the paternal guidance of Lorne Greene is Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama, an old-school Battlestar commander in an archaic ship, and this time he’s sharing power and responsibility with a civilian President (Mary McDonnell), much to his crusty frustration. And there are other inspired reinventions: Baltar (James Callis), an absurdly evil and short sighted villain in the original, is a tormented scientist tricked into becoming a traitor and haunted by a phantom Cylon sexpot (Tricia Helfer), and the swaggering hotshot pilot Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) is a cigar-chomping, rule-breaking girl who looks like she could kick Dirk Benedict’s ass around the galaxy and back.

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The Sherlock Holmes Collection (1968) (A&E) – Peter Cushing first played Sherlock Holmes in the Hammer Films version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a gothic take on the classic Holmes novel directed by Terence Fisher. It was dream casting, not just visually (his gaunt face and hawklike profile made him the heir apparent to Basil Rathbone) but temperamentally; he seems to be the very embodiment of science and reason (attributes that made him such a great Van Helsing in the Dracula series).

Peter Cushing and Nigel Stock

Which makes this discovery such a find. Cushing returned to the role of the greatest detective in the late sixties BBC series Sherlock Holmes. Only six episodes survive and they have been collected in this three-disc set, which is headlined by the two-part adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles (Cushing’s second take on the famous tale) and includes faithful adaptations of Conan Doyle classics The Sign of Four and A Study in Scarlet among the episodes. Cushing is a hearty Holmes and his friendship with the observant and intelligent (if not nearly so brilliant) Watson (Nigel Stock) grounds the show. This show is produced in the familiar BBC manner, with studio scenes shot on video and location footage on film, but it’s a convention that fans of vintage British TV have become accustomed to and the shows look quite good on the A&E discs. Six episodes on three discs, plus the featurette “Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective.”

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