Law & Order: SVU - The Fourth Year

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 18, 2007

Law & Order and its various spinoffs are some of the most ubiquitous shows on television today. On any given day at any given time, you can probably find an episode or three scattered on any of the three syndicated network pickups. That being said, why would you ever need to own them on DVD?

Personally I’m a big fan of Special Victims Unit and it ranks as my favorite spinoff of the franchise, maybe even more entertaining to me than the original. The Fourth Year is a strong season full of what you expect; an angry Christopher Meloni, a bristling hot Mariska Hargitay and special appearances from recognizable stars (Fred Savage pops up on this disc). The often overlooked Detective Munch is a personal favorite of mine. The cases range from rape, to serial killing, to kidnapping and torture, as always a fun time!

The actual show itself is great. If you really really love SVU, you’ll love this DVD. Unless you love it so much you want some extras or special features. You don’t get any. The show - good. The DVD - barely adequate. The sound and picture and presentation are all fine. They look and sound as good as they should. But don’t expect commentary or behind the scenes features or anything of the like. This is a straight up delivery of 25 episodes.

One positive is that each episode comes with two synopsis - one on the DVD case which will guide you in your selection of the episode and then a further in depth synopsis that tells you more of the plot and mentions to the guest stars. This will help you track down a specific episode you’re hunting for.

One negative is the disc layout. The main menu is fine, but if you navigate to “Episode Selection,” in a move to spice up the boring design, they have set all the selections in a staggered pattern which can lead to annoying shifts of the cursor when you’re navigating with the DVD remote. Staggering them does little to nothing for the aesthetics, but actually slows down navigation - so that’s a negative to me.

There’s not much here to say. If you’re an ownership freak or just want to have Special Victims Unit on call 24-7, then this is for you. If you’d rather just watch it on TV, then skip this one out. The DVD’s utter lack of extras is disappointing.

Grade: C-

Read more articles by Robert Fure