TV on DVD REVIEW: TNT’s Leverage Season 1

We have been on the Leverage TNT Bandwagon since episode one and I had a great interview with the great Dean Devlin and one of the show’s stars Aldis Hodge. The show started off a bit rough but picked up steam as the season progressed. The cast really started to gel well together. I’m usually not a fan of the “Heist” story, but I like the overall premise of the show: A group of super bad con men banning together to do some good in the world and turn their skills onto the evil corporations and other big executives who think they are above the law. If I had one complaint about the show is, I think it’s a bit over directed and stylized when it doesn’t need to be. The season one DVD set includes all the season one episodes and a nice set of extras.

Special Features

• Leverage Behind the Scenes (13 mins) – Funny they have a real con-man named Apollo Robins as their resident expert.
• Anatomy of a Stunt Fight (3 mins) – A pretty cool deconstruction of one of the show’s unique fight scenes.
• The Cameras of Leverage (2 Min) – A look at the Sony XD Cameras they shoot with. Not sure what the point of this feature is since it’s all visual with no one telling us why we should care.
• Leverage Gets Renewed (2 Min)
• Beth Riesgraf’s Crazy Actress Spoof (5 Min) – Apparently they have a day where they all the actors can come in and give ideas about their characters. This is a spoof of that process. Very cute, the idea of having Parker merge with a Shark to create Sharker is gold!
• Deleted Scenes

Update

I neglected to mention that Leverage Season 1 does do something unique – every episode has a commentary track. I generally don’t listen to commentary tracks so didn’t look too deeply into it beyond the first episode commentary.

Conclusion

Leverage is a good heist show that doesn’t take itself to seriously. The first few episodes are rough around the edges but it all gets smoothed out and features a young up and coming likeable cast. The DVD is a little disappointing in the fact that it doesn’t do anything special or different than most TV on DVD, which is odd because I know the show producer and sometime director Dean Devlin is a technical director and loves to push the envelope. In my conversation with him he said he was very excited about the potential of the Blu-ray format and he had big plans for it. But this is DVD and it’s good, not great. If you are a fan of the show – and I am, then there’s no real reason not to get this.  Leverage is available now on DVD. You can watch Season Two on TNT, Wednesday nights at 8pm.

Grades

• TV Show – B
• Picture Quality – A
• Audio – B
• Menu – B
• Extras – C

Final Overall Grade B

EM Review
By Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 7.22.09