The Blu-Ray/DVD set

Yeah, that director's cut was pretty awesome. I didn't know they were newbies at making a tv show - I sure couldn't tell that by watching! Only a couple of edits didn't quite sit right with me, but that's over the course of the entire first season - an impressive success rate by any standard!

Looking back at the season as a whole, I have three minor gripes and one major one.
The minor ones:
1. Paige Turco's line, "If you're going to do something wrong, do it right." The delivery is overdone imo, or maybe it's just a bad line and there was no good way to deliver it.

2. The upstart lawyer who grew up in Queens, yet sees no harm in walking down a NYC street alone at night listening to music through earbuds? I know it was for the comedic value of Reese taking out her assailant without her even noticing, but come on.

3. And a very minute one: it bugs me that the DVD booklet refers to "The Machine," with a capitol T, rather than "the Machine." Nobody is That Important

The major one, I will discuss in the s2e1 thread because that episode has some bearing on it even though it was already bugging me in s1.

Favorite line from s1 is Finch's line, "Meandering exposition is kind of my thing." Wink, wink, what fourth wall?

Overall, s1 was awesome. I could watch it over and over - in fact, I already have! - looking for stuff I missed before and above all, trying to figure out who the eight people are (or 11 now, counting Reese, Peck and Root). The writing and acting are of course what really stand out. I've said it before and I'm sure many others have, too: whoever had the idea to pair up Caviezel and Emerson was a genius. Their chemistry is what I will miss most about s2 (though it has a very palpable replacement in the interplay between Emerson and Acker, which literally makes me shiver). Henson and Chapman are consistently strong and one advantage of Reese not having Finch around is, presumably, he will work more closely with Carter!

Nolan and Plageman praise the rest of their crew every chance they get, above all the editors. To see how good the editors are, just pop in the dvd and see how you are drawn in, even the second, third, fourth time watching. The "meandering exposition" that could grow wearisome, never does, not only due to Emerson's superb delivery but also because we are always cutting between shots of him talking and shots of what he's describing taking place over his voiceover.

As for the dvd set itself, the other big feature besides the director's cut of the pilot is a series of interviews spliced together under the title, "Surveillance." This was a very good feature, but it was only one. (The gag reel is so short as to hardly qualify.) I long for more. They said that the show started out as a sci-fi concept, so I wish they had taken a cue from the dvds of other sci-fi franchises and put in more extras, particularly deleted scenes and a cast commentary would have been awesome (I know it's expensive, but just for the pilot? Please? Or at least thoughts from the cast regarding evolution of their characters in certain episodes, maybe in written form in the booklet?)

And ESPECIALLY better menus! What a sad, lost opportunity: they could have done amazing animations incorporating the Machine graphics! Instead, the menus look very templatey. I have a feeling that if I were to buy the dvd of any other CBS drama, the menus would have exactly the same icons because none of said icons have anything to do with POI. For example, the icon of the gag reel is the Greek comedy mask. I wish they had tried harder.

For consistency's sake they will probably not improve the menus for the s2 dvd. But let's hope for more features.