Could The Defenders Be Released on DVD? (1 Viewer)

[FanCollector]

I think The Benefactor does do what you suggest in your first point, Jack, in that it presents both sides, but not in an equal way. I wouldn't really expect a writer to give equal weight to both sides, though. He or she will have more passion for his or her own beliefs, and passion does have a place in good writing. (Admittedly, there are other important components to good writing also.) Unlike Arrest and Trial, The Defenders did seem to be careful not to make the prosecutor a villain.

I would suggest that the show is not guilty of the other accusation, though. A lot of shows with social agendas do urge specific action. (A show I know you and I both enjoy--Quincy, M.E.--certainly did so on occasion.) I didn't see The Benefactor trying to go down that road. It seemed to me that Stone's point was that there is a problem that we as a society have not sufficiently addressed and there are negative consequences as a result, so we should have the discussion and decide on something to solve the problem. No one in the show seems to be pushing any specific legislative or public change. The one thing all sides seem agreed on is that the defendant, although they respect his courage and feel sorry for his loss, needs to stop doing what he is doing because he is right to recognize the problem but wrong in how he is responding. Beyond that, I read the show as just trying to convince the audience that the problem existed, rather than advocating a clear solution.

At the same time, I think you are right to point out that not everyone will love this series. While I don't see it as being exceptionally forceful about its agenda, it touches on a lot of real-world issues and some people aren't looking for that kind of show. We can differ about how inclusive the writing is, but I think your original point about some viewers just not caring for this type of entertainment is well-taken. I don't think art can ever be fully "balanced," so if the viewer doesn't like programming with a discernible opinion behind it, then this might not be the show for them, which is perfectly fine. If every person likes the same work of art, it makes me a little suspicious anyway!

 

[Ian K McLachlan]

I have now finished watching the final episode of season 1 - The Broken Barrelhead. When it started I thought that it was going to go in one direction but as it often happens in this show it went in another. I think that it was very clever to conclude the first season with a show which was partly about a father/son relationship because after all that is what lies at the heart of the series. The relationship between parents and children also featured in Along Came a Spider. I worked out fairly early on what the conclusion of this episode would be - but I wonder if it is because I saw it originally all these years ago. The Benefactor was an interesting episode. I do have fairly strong views on the issue myself but I would say that this episode dealt with it very fairly overall. I think it makes the point that the law must be upheld but that laws must constantly change and evolve. The Locked Room was another episode that I really found interesting and perhaps I might say that this last disc has been my favourite. I had memories of E.G. Marshall being a very good and strong actor and seeing these episodes has confirmed my view of him. And has got me wanting to watch some of his other work. I think that it is safe to say that this release has probably produce more comments....and very thoughtful ones....than just about any other release. Science fiction series usually produce a number of devoted followers. I don't think that can be said for all that many other dramatic series. I do hope that SHOUT find some way of releasing some more episodes because I would like to find out what happened next to Preston and Preston. So a big thank you to SHOUT for this release and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. Television can do many things. But it is good when it gets people thinking.

 

[jperez]

I'm also not a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal but I didn't have any problems reading the article at this link

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-defenders-was-a-golden-exception-to-tvs-vast-wasteland-1473285041

 

[Clay Forrester]

I didn't agree with everything in the WSJ article, but I thought it was fine. Re: the Minnow statement -- we should not overlook his added caveat: "you'll be inclined to doubt his word" as well as this countering statement: "there was no shortage of gripping prime-time fare scattered among the dross." And, yes, I also happen to like a lot of dross. We all need some dross. And as they say, "one man's dross..."

The article also warns of a liberal bias -- for anyone looking for a kind of surgeon general's warning.

I liked very much that he slammed the uninformed viewpoint that serious drama was born about 15 years ago.

But really, the important thing about this article for me, and anyone else looking for the next three seasons: increased awareness = increased sales.

 

[Darby67]

Amazon's Best Sellers Ranks as of 8:24 PM (CST) on September 8, 2016:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #227 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • #54 in Movies & TV > DVD > Drama

 

[Clay Forrester]

Amazon's Best Sellers Ranks as of 8:24 PM (CST) on September 8, 2016:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #227 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • #54 in Movies & TV > DVD > Drama

Outstanding. Highest I've seen it. This spike is likely due in no small part to LA Times and Wall Street Journal, both of which were from Shout's effort.

 

[Darby67]

I, too, have had trouble accessing the Wall Street Journal article without being a subscriber and I'm trying to do a workaround, but in the meantime here is excerpted form of Terry Teachout's article; http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/

I also emailed Terry this evening to thank him for the article.

 

[Stephen Bowie]

Click on the link. Copy the headline. Paste the headline into Google. Click on the WSJ piece when it comes up in the Google results. Same firewall workaround as with the New York Times.

 

[Doug Wallen]

Thanks Sean for posting that brief bit. I still cannot get to the full article, even with the above directions.

 

[jperez]

• ARTS
• ARTS IN REVIEW
• SIGHTINGS

‘The Defenders’ Was a Golden Exception to TV’s ‘Vast Wasteland’
‘The Defenders’ brought serious drama—and serious subjects—to the small screen back in the ’60s

ENLARGE
E.G. Marshall in a scene from ‘The Defenders.’ PHOTO: COURTESY OF SHOUT FACTORY

By
TERRY TEACHOUT
Sept. 7, 2016 5:51 p.m. ET
17 COMMENTS

Television was born in 1999, or maybe last Tuesday. Such, it seems, is the assumption of those critics who take it for granted that serious TV drama didn’t exist until “The Sopranos” came along, and that the dramatic series of the 21st century are so uniquely excellent that they put their predecessors far back in the shade. Witness “TV (The Book),” a newly published guide by Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz to the 100 greatest shows of all time. Their top-10 list includes just five dramas, “Breaking Bad,” “Deadwood,” “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos” and “The Wire,” all of which ran between 1999 and 2015.

Um...maybe. But older viewers may feel inclined to cast their nets more widely. Even in the ’60s, which brought us such exercises in silliness as “Gilligan’s Island” and “Mr. Ed,” there was no shortage of gripping prime-time fare scattered among the dross. Take “The Defenders,” among the most acclaimed dramas of that dread decade. Yes, it’s in black and white, but the best episodes of “The Defenders” are still as fresh and vital as anything you’ll see on the tube today. To binge-watch “The Defenders: Season One,” a nine-DVD set recently released by Shout! Factory, is to realize that series-TV drama for grownups wasn’t invented by David Chase.

“The Defenders,” which aired on CBS from 1961 to 1965, was one of TV’s first weekly courtroom dramas. Reginald Rose, the show’s creator, knew his way around the genre, having written “Twelve Angry Men,” which started life as a 1954 episode of “Studio One.” But it was nothing like the vastly more popular “ Perry Mason,” in which Raymond Burrput the bad guy on the stand each week and grilled him on both sides until he broke down and confessed. Instead, E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed played a father-and-son team of defense lawyers who took rock-hard cases that pivoted on such still-controversial issues as capital punishment, euthanasia and—in 1962, no less—abortion. “The law,” said Rose, “is the subject of our programs: not crime, not mystery, not the courtroom for its own sake.”

Rose, like most screenwriters then as now, was an unabashed liberal, and “The Defenders,” like “Twelve Angry Men,” sometimes lapsed into one-sided issue-of-the-week sermonizing. (“The Benefactor,” the pro-choice abortion episode, is a particularly heavy-handed case in point.) As the series developed, though, it became wholly adult in its willingness to acknowledge that in the real world, the good guys—and their lawyers—aren’t always as good as they seem. In that respect it resembled Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” which took a similarly tough-minded view of the legal process. It helped that “The Defenders” was amazingly well acted, above all by Marshall, an unglamorous but immensely distinguished stage actor who is now best remembered for appearing opposite Bert Lahr in the Broadway premiere of “Waiting for Godot” and playing Juror No. 4 in the film version of “Twelve Angry Men.” No less impressive were the supporting casts, which included the then-youthful likes of Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman and James Earl Jones. In addition, the show also profited from superior music by Frank Lewin and Leonard Rosenman.

But the coolly realistic scripts of Rose and his writers did more than anything else to make the show so memorable. “The Defenders” made its debut four months after Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared American TV to be a “vast wasteland” of banality. He had a point—to put it mildly—but you’ll be inclined to doubt his word after watching an episode like “The Best Defense,” written byErnest Kinoy, in which Martin Balsam plays an arrogant career criminal who is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. “Who do I get to defend me?” he asks Marshall, who is understandably reluctant to represent so shady a character. “Somebody I can buy? Somebody who’ll defend, let’s say, Hitler, if the price is right? Where do I get a respectable lawyer?” What follows is an hour of well-wrought drama that is as refreshingly unmelodramatic as it is richly involving—and ends with a head-snapping twist.

The authors of “TV (The Book)” rank “The Defenders” at No. 59—not bad, but not terrific. Fortunately, the show has never lacked for critical advocates. Among them is Stephen Bowie, author of “The Classic TV History Blog: Dispatches From the Vast Wasteland” and an authority on the “platinum-age” TV dramas (his phrase) of the ’60s, who believes it to be “one of the most important television series to air on an American broadcast network.” Alas, “The Defenders” vanished from syndication long before VCRs went on the market and was never released on home video, meaning that few people under the age of 70 have seen it. All praise, then, to Shout! Factory for introducing a new generation of viewers to what might just be the greatest TV drama of the ’60s.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings,” a column about the arts, every other Thursday. Write to him at [email protected]

 

[Matt Hough]

Thank you for providing the article for those who couldn't access it.

 

[Doug Wallen]

Thanks Jorge! I appreciate being able to read the whole article.

 

[Darby67]

I have noticed that retailers such as Deep Discount and Amazon have the set on backorder or " in stock on___" which hopefully is a good sign that their sales of the set have been brisk as of late.

 

[GMBurns]

Amazon's Best Sellers Ranks as of 8:24 PM (CST) on September 8, 2016:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #227 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • #54 in Movies & TV > DVD > Drama

What does this translate to in actual sales? i.e., how many units would Shout actually need to sell to consider doing work for a season 2 release? And how does that compare to sales numbers that someone like CBS requires to continue their releases? And would someone like the Warner Archive need fewer sales since they burn on demand? None of this really matters but I’ve always been curious, especially when it’s a show that I really want that gets abandoned due to poor sales.

 

[Rick Thompson]

I started with Episode 1. The sympathy for a doctor killing a newborn child with severe learning disability (Down Syndrome, but "Mongoloid" was the term then) turned me right off. This isn't abortion; the child was born alive. A doctor just decided to play God. But hey, he meant well!

 

[Buck Benny]

I started with Episode 1. The sympathy for a doctor killing a newborn child with severe learning disability (Down Syndrome, but "Mongoloid" was the term then) turned me right off. This isn't abortion; the child was born alive. A doctor just decided to play God. But hey, he meant well!

I agree, but with this old of a series taking on cotrvesial issues, you have to expect that some of the terminology and language will be dated and inacurate and even the science can be wrong.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I agree, but with this old of a series taking on cotrvesial issues, you have to expect that some of the terminology and language will be dated and inacurate and even the science can be wrong.

I don't think he was complaining about the terminology but in terminating a life that was worth living.

 

[Stephen Bowie]

I don't think he was complaining about the terminology but in terminating a life that was worth living.

Which is, of course, highly debatable ... and that episode incorporates such a debate, with the Prestons on opposite sides.

 

[FanCollector]

That aspect of the debate is pretty well dispatched by the episode. Ken starts out opposed to his father and the law, but his experience in the park brings him around. I didn't feel that the episode was particularly interested in the view that the doctor was right; just whether the question of intent is relevant to punishment. The episode's real debate seemed, in effect, to be whether the doctor should be imprisoned or executed.

 

[jim_falconer]

Driving home from work tonight I saw a small convertible car on the highway. Made me realize how much I miss seeing episodes of "The Defender", and Ken Preston driving his mini hotrod around town.