Felicity: The Complete First Season (1998)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Features:

• All twenty-two first season episodes
  
• Screen-specific audio commentary by Abrams and Reeves on the pilot and last episode
  
• "Sneak Peeks"
  

Felicity Porter (Russell) has just graduated from high school and has dreams of going to college. She has her bags all packed to go to Stanford to be a medical student. However, she changes her plans after reading what Ben Covington (Speedman), her long-time high-school crush, had written in her senior yearbook--she decides to give up her plans of going to Stanford and follows him to NYU. Needless to say, when she gets there, it's not exactly what she expected.

Well, the first season of this show was pretty good. They actually had a great feel for what life was like for white, upper-middle class, high school seniors in the late 1990s. Each episode is filled with what appears to be simple teen angst, but the actors do a really nice job of digging a little deeper and really breathing some life into these characters. The angst is not so much a problem of the writers, because its difficult to write human characters at this time in their lives. At this age, it is the nature of people not to know what the hell they are going to do next. Given that difficulty, they came as close as anyone could hope for on a modern American television show. Kudos to them for writing a show that works for a wide range of demographics.

The only special feature that exsists across this six disc set are the commentary tracks, featuring the co-creators of the series. Abrams and Reeves have a nice tone about them and the feed off of each other's energy and ideas very well. The information that they disseminate on these tracks are at the same time appropriate and entertaining. My only qualm with this DVD is that the only feature is the commentary track and it only covers the pilot episode and the season closer. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't really expect these two guys to talk over all twenty-two episodes of this show, but it sure would have been nice to have something else to go along with this package. How about a featurette that highlights all the guest stars during that first season, or a behind-the-scenes featurette, or a series of interviews with the stars of the show? The commentary's scene-specific, too, which means you have huge gaps in the yapping.

All things considered, this is a nice package, but its not the type of thing that you would want to add to your collection unless you are a hardcore fan of the show.