For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

TV WORTH BUYING: 'Get Smart' deal

Great price on Amazon's deal of the day -- Don Adams' 1960s spy spoof Get Smart, an enduring comic treat from writers Mel Brooks (pre-feature films) and Buck Henry (pre-Saturday Night Live), with mod icon Barbara Feldon playing savvy Agent 99 to Adams' silly Agent 86.

The entire boxed set of five seasons is on sale Thursday for $68, down from a $200 list price and Amazon's regular $105 tab. Only the first season has yet hit retail individually; Season 2 is due March 10.

Bonus features are abundant, too, with each season getting an entire disc of extras -- commentaries/interviews with Brooks, Henry and other cast/crew; audio intros by Feldon; making-of featurettes and pop culture retrospectives; a 2003 reunion; other TV appearances by Adams and Feldon; even archival material like network standards and practices (i.e., censor) memos -- all packaged in a box with opening "doors" like the show's classic credits sequence. It's another exceptional DVD set produced by our "raider of the lost archives" pal Paul Brownstein.

Get Smart isn't just fun to watch -- then and now -- but also resonates today as shaping an entire generation's sense of humor and wit. Kids who grew up watching this lampoon of the '60s James Bond craze would become the original audience for Saturday Night Live and Brooks' '70s big-screen skewerings of westerns, Hitchcock, horror flicks and more. This is where TV humor got hip.

And don't get us started on the catchphrases that became pop culture ubiquities. "Sorry about that, Chief." "Missed it by that much." "I asked you not to tell me that!" "Would you believe..."

Would you believe this DVD is a don't-miss deal?

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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