Great New DVD Releases: Clear Eyes, Crafty Killers, Flying Squirrels

This week's batch of new releases of TV shows on DVD includes an absurdly entertaining triple helping of great shows, and the range couldn't be more eclectic. Coincidentally, they're all Season Four releases - of NBC/DirecTV's Friday Night Lights, Showtime's Dexter, and the classic Rocky & Bullwinkle adventures...

Season four of Friday Night Lights (Universal Home Video, 3 discs) is the season we almost didn't get to see, until NBC made a deal with DirecTV to split costs. The satellite service got the better end of the deal, and got to televise all 13 episodes before NBC began showing them. Consequently, NBC showed the finale of season four only 11 days ago -- yet here it is, available on DVD beginning today.

Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, both up for Emmys this year (for the first time!), star as Eric and Tami Taylor, a high-school football coach and his high-school principal wife, living in a small, football-obsessed Texas town. Friday Night Lights is one of the best family drama series ever made, and the performances by the young supporting cast are strong enough to almost rival the award-worthy portrayals by the show's starring couple.

Coach Taylor's motto, to inspire his gritty pack of gridiron players, is an encouraging mantra for life as well as sport: "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose." If you buy this set, you can't lose, either. You can order it HERE.

(And remember, if you order through Amazon, via these supplied TV WORTH WATCHING links, we get a small but much-appreciated percentage of the purchase price, and of anything else you buy during that visit. Costs you nothing more. Helps us stay alive.)

Season four of Dexter (CBS/Showtime, 4 discs) is the most recent one, featuring John Lithgow in a ultra-creepy, season-long guest arc as a serial murderer who, like Michael C. Hall's Dexter, hides in plain sight. All 12 episode are here, including the cliffhanger ending that will thrust Dexter into a new orbit when the show returns on Showtime Sept. 26.

Dexter is one of TV's best shows right now, and certainly one of its most unusual. Order it HERE. Or on Blu-Ray HERE.

Finally, there's a blast from the much more distant past. The "Rocky & Bullwinkle" cartoons by Jay Ward Studios, shown on TV in prime time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, have been repackaged (and retitled) by Classic Media, in season-long compilations. Originally from The Bullwinkle Show, this fourth season (Classic Media, 2 discs) collection, called Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, includes Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle the talking moose, cold-war spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, and so much more... "Fractured Fairy Tales," Sherman and Mr. Peabody's time travels, and... oh, just buy it.

I was in my 20s before I learned that there was an opera, by Mussorgsky, named Boris Godunov, based on a real-life Russian Tsar. I've never quite looked at Boris Badenov -- or Bullwinkle -- the same way since. If possible, I adore them even more.

For the timeless, peerless season four frivolity, you can order it HERE.

Three great TV series. Three great DVD releases, all on the same day. Boy, I love 21st-century technology...