Fifty years ago, Alfred Hitchcock introduced the world to his famous silhouette and theme music, and became one of the iconic figures of the century. "Good evening", he would begin, as the start of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a weekly television series branding his name to original mystery vignettes and suspenseful snippets. His deadpan and endearing turn as host of the long-running (ten seasons) series, helped to catapult his visual image to match that of his already popular directorial status. It's been a long-time coming (through no fault of his own, as he might say) but the series is finally making its debut on DVD.

The first episodes appeared on air in the fall of 1955, several years before The Twilight Zone, and many decades before The X-Files, but in the same way helped to capture the imagination of audiences just looking for good mystery stories. The first season puts its best foot forward, with star power, smart writing, and the always enjoyable banter of its famous host.

Although most of the episodes were neither written nor directed by Mr. Hitchcock himself, his involvement in quality control helps to keep everything within his universe of influence. Several people from his film work make appearances with the show, either in front of the camera or behind, giving a sense of continuity between the big screen and its smaller cousin. Although the series comes at a point in time that is just a few years before his most celebrated films (namely Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest), Hitchcock was already immensely popular through classic films such as Rear Window, Strangers On A Train, Dial M For Murder and many more. Contrary to the conventions of today, making the leap from movies to television only bolstered his image, instead of dampening it.

The DVD release of this first season captures all 39 episodes, with each episode running for about twenty-five minutes after commercials have been cut out. The 3-disc set utilizes dual-sided discs to keep that much content in a manageable sized case. Personally I found this to be a good thing. Boxed sets take up a lot of room, and I'm grateful for the help in optimizing shelf space.

The set is nicely but sparsely packaged. There are a few images from the series used, but it's just a fold-out digipak for the three discs, with no booklet or other keepsake material. The video presentation is also very streamlined. There are no options on the discs, save for selecting an episode and deciding whether or not to turn on subtitles. In fact, there aren't even any scene selections, as each episode is indexed as an entire chapter (so you're going to have to manually fast-forward to that favorite scene). Each episode does contain a quick synopsis screen with a paragraph or so of summary, but I would recommend skipping these, as many contained spoilers for the episodes (which I thought was a bit counterproductive for mysteries).