Are you Glee-ful enough to buy something you're going to end up buying again in the full set..?

I originally was filling up this space with a meandering series of paragraphs wondering about the dollar value of this DVD set, but there’s really no point. This set is a stopover money-grab until this September, when the full-season box comes out two weeks before season three starts. I really hate this release pattern of half-seasons (and this one isn’t even half a season - it’s ten episodes!), it smacks of crassness and the dearth of meaningful extras reeks of chintz.

The episodes themselves are middling at best (ranking C+ / B- / C / B+ / C+ / B- / D+ / B- / A- / B) and the extras will all be included when these three discs are cloned for the full-season set. What extras are here at least aren’t terrible, but there’s so few. Beside that, where’s the commentaries? There hasn’t been a single commentary for any of the sets so far. If there are two universal truths about actors and writers, one is that they love to talk about what they do within its own context and the other is that people will pay money to listen to it. It’s a proven fact that now, twenty-five years after the first audio commentary, that people who are really into a product want as much information as possible about it and will sit and watch something they’ve seen numerous times in order to listen to someone talk over it.

Anyway, save your money; this stuff will be available later this year - it’s not worth going out of your way to get the pittance presented here. If you really want to watch these episodes again before the season continues, Hulu has the last five episodes free and all ten can be had on iTunes and Amazon for a dollar apiece.

Shame. Shame upon the House of Murdoch. Shame.

Disc Two

“The Making of The Rocky Horror Glee Show” - A quick six minutes on the season’s second tribute episode. Only notable for the rehearsal and make-up room footage; the interview segments are a joke.

“Planet, Schmanet, Janet” - A completely superfluous half of a song where I can’t be bothered to figure out who sings it, since the visual is just a (poorly) digitally isolated mouth, a la the opening of the episode.

Disc Three

“Getting Waxed with Jane Lynch” - A nifty little feature about the creation of Sue’s wax figure for Madame Tussaud’s. I wonder how much harder it was to do the process back in the days before 3D modeling and capture technology.

“The Wit of Brittany” - A montage of Brittany’s one-liners. I think they’re all there, but I didn’t count. I would’ve liked some sort of interview with Heather Morris and/or one of the writers talking about the development of the character (which was, at one time, available on Hulu).

“Glee at Comic-Con 2010” - Fifteen minutes or so of the second and third stringers, plus Ryan Murphy and some other silent producer from a panel at last year’s SDCC. When only half of an ensemble shows up, you have to wonder what the other half was doing that was so important. Would it have been too much to ask for them to have included the whole panel discussion?

All discs - Glee Music Jukebox - You can jump straight to any of the songs from a list. Useful.

Grades

Show: C+
Picture: B+
Sound: A-
Disc Two Extras: C-
Disc Three Extras: B-

Glee: Season 2, Volume 1 is out now.

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