Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
As much as I’m not really into the whole family television drama stuff, I have to wonder why a show like Everwood was canceled by WB execs. One quick comparison to other contemporary shows of the time, such as The O.C. or 7th Heaven, should suffice as comprehensible evidence that Everwood was a superior series. Mostly, it’s all about ratings: if a show doesn’t have as many viewers as the network thinks it should have, they give it the axe — pissing off their faithful viewers in the process.
C’est la vie, right?
To add further insult to the fans, when Warner Brothers started releasing the series on DVD, with a long gap in-between the first and second seasons, too — causing a lot of folks to wonder what the hell was going on. The reason for this was music copyrights: execs didn’t want to shell out any additional dough on this series to renew the rights for the popular songs heard in the episodes when they were originally aired, so, after a lengthy delay, they replaced the copyrighted tunes with new tracks (that didn’t cost ’em as much).
Ratings, copyrights, bah! Well, despite the delay, Warner finally got around to releasing Everwood: The Complete Fourth Season on DVD, to wit they offended the show’s devotees by not giving too much of a crap about the video quality. Many of the episodes in this set are pretty inferior when you take into consideration that this series was shot and broadcast in 2005 and 2006.
But, I suppose there’s no use complaining here: we should just appreciate the fact that the final season of Everwood is now here, complete with all of the family-friendly television drama that hooked millions of viewers the first time around. Now, if one were to praise the positive aspects of this farewell season on DVD, they would definitely have to mention that Warner’s five-disc, twenty-two episode set of Everwood: The Complete Fourth Season also features over 40 minutes of unaired footage (aka deleted scenes) as well as an alternate series ending that was filmed just in case the network decided to renew the show for a fifth season.
I guess it’s worth it for that alone (especially for the fans), even if the picture quality isn’t all that hot at times.
