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Charmed Season 1 Blu-Ray
Well, there are few pleasures on this earth better than a reet good telly show in high definition, and to my complete surprise, the first season of Charmed came out on Blu-Ray recently. I assume this has something to do with promoting the reboot which I haven't seen yet. But man, oh man, what a glorious box set this is.
Minor niggles first: no extras. No commentaries, documentaries, trailers. Just the episodes. The audio has not been mixed for surround (which I think it could have easily been, since there must be at least a pro-logic mix knocking around).
But the new HD transfer is nothing short of stunning. Every shot, bar a small handful from the last couple of episodes, has been rescanned and reframed in widescreen. Every visual effect has been re-composited. Only the stock-footage inserts of San Francisco have been routinely upscaled and cropped from SD, and since most of them play over the credits near the start of each episode, they can be easily overlooked.
So let's develop these points. Charmed was shot open matte on 35mm film. What this means, technically, is that while it was originally framed 4:3, effort was made to avoid things like boom mics creeping into the cropped areas. Now opened out and given room to breathe, the detail is incredibly cinematic. The Halliwell manor, which always looked picturesque, is revealed as a beautifully dressed group of sets, the attic in particular. One near-360-degree pan of the attic set is almost worth the cover price alone. Now, since directors framed for 4:3, there could have been a tendency for the action to clump together in the middle of the screen. While this is occasionally true, virtually all of the time the "negative space" of the frame is filled with detail.
And then there's the effects work. Now, I don't expect TV CGI from twenty years ago to hold up today. But while the effects are often basic, there's a clarity and simplicity to them that makes them work just fine. I'm not sure what effort went into the re-composites, but if you've ever watched Babylon 5 in widescreen and noticed an obvious drop in quality each time there's a composite shot, there's none of that here. In particular, Piper's time-freezing power is handled with a mixture of still frames, green-screen and split-screen. I was worried they'd just ask the other actors to stand as still as possible, which would look terribly cheesy now. But that only happens a couple of times. Almost every time they combine freeze-frame with live action, the join is seamless. There's one particular shot I rewound two or three times to see if I could figure out how they actually did it, it's that good. This is 99% as good as this season could possibly look, and it's an absolute joy to savour.
Of course, the actual content is important too. For the first two-thirds of the season, the show is still working out its balance of emotion, quirky humour and action, and the strongest episodes are definitely back-loaded. Even the disposable episodes, though, like "Feats of Clay" or "When Bad Warlocks Go Good" have some stunning shots in them; the latter episode has a great Dutch-angle shot of a catholic church which, while it doesn't quite make up for the slightly pedestrian plot, is nonetheless a pleasure to watch.
Another benefit of watching a great transfer on a decent-sized screen is that more subdued acting performances can reveal layers of nuance and complexity. The greatest beneficiary of this is T W King, playing Prue's on-again-off-again cop boyfriend, who has the thankless task of going through the same motions in several episodes. King manages not only to find subtly different ways of approaching the repetitive scenes, but tracking his developing feelings for Prue across the season in a dynamic way. On a somewhat more random note, it's always nice to spot future stars in early roles, and a young John Cho as a murder-victim-cum-ghost wins the season's award for most improved player.
A last point: I'm informed by the Internet that some previous releases had soundtrack song substitutions on them due to the cost of clearance, and that this release restores all music used on original broadcast. That wouldn't bother me much since most of the songs are somewhat generic 90s folky-pop, but it's still nice to know there's that extra level of authenticity.
All in all, this release has taken a twenty-year old show and made it shimmer with atmosphere, dimensionality and detail, and I hope season two gets the same treatment very soon.
Minor niggles first: no extras. No commentaries, documentaries, trailers. Just the episodes. The audio has not been mixed for surround (which I think it could have easily been, since there must be at least a pro-logic mix knocking around).
But the new HD transfer is nothing short of stunning. Every shot, bar a small handful from the last couple of episodes, has been rescanned and reframed in widescreen. Every visual effect has been re-composited. Only the stock-footage inserts of San Francisco have been routinely upscaled and cropped from SD, and since most of them play over the credits near the start of each episode, they can be easily overlooked.
So let's develop these points. Charmed was shot open matte on 35mm film. What this means, technically, is that while it was originally framed 4:3, effort was made to avoid things like boom mics creeping into the cropped areas. Now opened out and given room to breathe, the detail is incredibly cinematic. The Halliwell manor, which always looked picturesque, is revealed as a beautifully dressed group of sets, the attic in particular. One near-360-degree pan of the attic set is almost worth the cover price alone. Now, since directors framed for 4:3, there could have been a tendency for the action to clump together in the middle of the screen. While this is occasionally true, virtually all of the time the "negative space" of the frame is filled with detail.
And then there's the effects work. Now, I don't expect TV CGI from twenty years ago to hold up today. But while the effects are often basic, there's a clarity and simplicity to them that makes them work just fine. I'm not sure what effort went into the re-composites, but if you've ever watched Babylon 5 in widescreen and noticed an obvious drop in quality each time there's a composite shot, there's none of that here. In particular, Piper's time-freezing power is handled with a mixture of still frames, green-screen and split-screen. I was worried they'd just ask the other actors to stand as still as possible, which would look terribly cheesy now. But that only happens a couple of times. Almost every time they combine freeze-frame with live action, the join is seamless. There's one particular shot I rewound two or three times to see if I could figure out how they actually did it, it's that good. This is 99% as good as this season could possibly look, and it's an absolute joy to savour.
Of course, the actual content is important too. For the first two-thirds of the season, the show is still working out its balance of emotion, quirky humour and action, and the strongest episodes are definitely back-loaded. Even the disposable episodes, though, like "Feats of Clay" or "When Bad Warlocks Go Good" have some stunning shots in them; the latter episode has a great Dutch-angle shot of a catholic church which, while it doesn't quite make up for the slightly pedestrian plot, is nonetheless a pleasure to watch.
Another benefit of watching a great transfer on a decent-sized screen is that more subdued acting performances can reveal layers of nuance and complexity. The greatest beneficiary of this is T W King, playing Prue's on-again-off-again cop boyfriend, who has the thankless task of going through the same motions in several episodes. King manages not only to find subtly different ways of approaching the repetitive scenes, but tracking his developing feelings for Prue across the season in a dynamic way. On a somewhat more random note, it's always nice to spot future stars in early roles, and a young John Cho as a murder-victim-cum-ghost wins the season's award for most improved player.
A last point: I'm informed by the Internet that some previous releases had soundtrack song substitutions on them due to the cost of clearance, and that this release restores all music used on original broadcast. That wouldn't bother me much since most of the songs are somewhat generic 90s folky-pop, but it's still nice to know there's that extra level of authenticity.
All in all, this release has taken a twenty-year old show and made it shimmer with atmosphere, dimensionality and detail, and I hope season two gets the same treatment very soon.