Viewers add DVD boxed sets to their home libraries

LOS ANGELES -- Want the whole of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" at your fingertips? Feel like shutting yourself in for a private marathon of "The X-Files"? Care to relive an entire season of America's favorite wiseguy family, "The Sopranos"?

The DVD format allows studios and distributors to put whole seasons of TV series in consumers' hands in compact boxed sets loaded with behind-the-scenes material and other extras for serious fans.

With the number of DVD players in U.S. homes approaching 25 million, collectible boxed sets have grown in popularity, and distributors have put out a rush of new sets in time for holiday-shopping season.

Packing as many as a couple of dozen episodes into a boxed set was impractical with the VHS format, which might require a foot of shelf space for a single season of some series. Both retailers and fans would have a hard time finding room.

On DVD, a full season requires just an inch or two of space, with bonuses such as cast interviews, deleted scenes, series trivia, director and writer commentary tracks and other features. DVDs also are more durable, provide better sound and images and eliminate that pesky task of rewinding videotapes.

Hard-core followers

"From a hard-core fan point of view, it enables them to get more into the series," said Peter Staddon, senior vice president for home-video marketing at 20th Century Fox, which launched the TV series boxed-set business with "The X-Files" first season DVD release last year.

The studio has worked its way up to season four, released last month, with plans to issue two seasons a year until it hits the end of the show's run.

Fox has been a leader in mining its television catalog for DVD, and other studios and distributors have quickly followed.

HBO has issued the first two seasons of "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" and will follow with the first season of "Oz" next year. MGM has put out season one of "Stargate SG-1." BBC Video released the full run of "Fawlty Towers." Showtime issues the first season of "Queer as Folk" in January. Artisan Entertainment this month comes out with the first season of "Twin Peaks."

The latter series is one of those TV rarities, a short-lived series that still has a devoted fan base 10 years after it went off the network schedule.

"The fans are very interested in the minutiae of the show, it seems to me," said "Twin Peaks" star Kyle MacLachlan. "I think the DVD set can dig up more stuff for them to go back and look at the series all over again."

Distributors shy away from releasing sales figures but say some sets have sold in the hundreds of thousands, bringing in tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Shows that top the Nielsen ratings are not necessarily the top candidates for complete-season release on DVD. Warner Bros. has taken a different approach for its hit series "Friends," putting out two-disc "best-of" sets rather than a full season's episodes.

Series with zealous audiences and continuing story lines such as "The X-Files" lend themselves more to full-season treatment. Audiences for those shows are smaller, but they are more likely the sort of loyal cult-series viewers to shell out $100 and up for some DVD sets.

Paramount has one of the mother lodes of TV franchises ripe for the DVD market in "Star Trek." The studio began releasing the original 1960s "Star Trek" series on DVD in 1999, in single discs containing two episodes each.

The final episodes come out on DVD this month, with the series taking up a bulky 40 discs.

"The boxed-set phenomenon came along later, after we had started," said Paramount home-video spokesman Martin Blythe. "Had we done it now, we probably would have done it differently."

Paramount has no immediate plans to issue the original "Star Trek" series in DVD boxed sets. But the first season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the franchise's second live-action series, debuts on DVD next spring.

Other "Star Trek" series will follow on DVD after the full seven seasons of "Next Generation" have been released.

A&E has been releasing such cult TV shows as "The Prisoner," "The Avengers," "Space: 1999" and "Thunderbirds" in two-disc sets. A&E plans to begin similar treatment for the detective series "Peter Gunn."