Season 8 DVD!

Glad that the entire series will now be available on DVD. I don't like having incomplete collections of shows.

Season 8 has been criticized (justifiably in my opinion) by many as being the weakest season of Newhart, where things got a little too cartoonish. But while there were some bad episodes that season, the good ones were very very good.


I was about to say that I couldn't recall some of those guest stars ever appearing on the show, then I remembered a bunch of CBS actors at the end of the episode when Baby Stephanie was born.

Here's my list of what I consider the top 5 episodes for the final season:

NOTE: I know everyone loves the final episode but I consider it a rip-off of 'Dallas' and I don't like the fact that everything we took as fact on this show for 8 years is suddenly wiped out with the last scene. It's too gimmicky for me.

1. 'Handymania' -- George invents a new game and the town is caught up in playing it. This is the only episode where we see actors using the left side of the balcony upstairs. The full inn set is used.

2. 'Poetry and Pastries' -- where Dick judges a poetry contest and Miss Goddard goes overboard to make sure she wins.

3. 'Utley Exposed' -- I love this one. It's fun to see the whole town weighing in on something George did years ago, some prank that tarnishes his normally squeaky clean image. Tom Poston is great in this story.

4. 'I Like You, Butt...' -- I feel like I shouldn't enjoy this one, given today's climate of extreme political correctness. But I think it's very funny and I've never seen another type of story like it on any other sitcom.

5. 'Child in Charge' -- Baby Steph is the new owner of WPIV. A great satire about the infantilism of network execs.

Shout Factory did a terrible/lazy job with the DVDs (seasons 2-8). I've never seen such a bad home video effort for a long-running TV show from a major network. The picture quality is horrible by DVD standards; it's not even as good as the original broadcast master tapes, which were most likely on Betacam, or possibly U-matic for the early seasons. So if you had good reception when they originally aired, they looked better than they do now on DVD, which is absurd. DVD is capable of much higher quality than NTSC broadcast quality.

On top of the generally poor picture quality, bright reds and blues were crushed / blown out, the color timing was all over the place, and a couple of episodes had humming/static in the audio.

Ironically, the first season DVDs (which were put out by 20th Century Fox) look better than seasons 2-8 from Shout Factory, even though the first season was shot on lowly video (U-matic or Betacam), whereas the rest of the seasons were shot on 35mm film, which is light years ahead of U-matic or Betacam in terms of picture quality. 35mm negatives can legitimately resolve to nearly 4K, while U-matic or Betacam would rank somewhere between VHS/Betamax and LaserDisc. For example, here's a screenshot from 20th Century Fox's season 1 DVD set, which should have the worst quality of all the seasons:

https://i.imgur.com/zb9XyTU.png

Now here's a screenshot from Shout Factory's season 8 DVD set, which should have the best quality by far:

https://i.imgur.com/xq8FCid.png

Utter garbage.

I'd like to know what Shout Factory used for a source. Probably some ancient syndication package Betacam tapes along with a dubious method of transferring them to digital files. If they had any pride whatsoever in their work they would have scanned in original film elements at at least 2K and created the DVD masters from those scans.