Season one DVD's

[Lee G]

I purchased the DVD's yesterday, 8-23. I've started watching these with disc 1, so far I've seen the Cosby interview and the first three episodes.

The Cosby "interview" is not your typicial question and answer session. What you see are snippets of scenes from the episodes with Cosby's comments in between. He speaks rather slowly, but he says some interesting things. The most interesting comment is when he talks about the dispute he had with NBC over the shows lack of a laugh track. Cosby didn't want a laugh track, NBC did. Cosby won the battle, but lost the war, as he feels NBC canceled the show after season two due to the laugh track dispute. He also talks at length about Lee Weaver, the actor who played his brother on the show. This bonus segment is OK, I was anticipating it to be better, a bit of a letdown.

Regarding the episodes, so far I've watched just the first three episodes. The picture and color quality are great, but I noticed there are sound problems on episodes 2 and 3. The sound is a little distorted. It sounds like it was originally recorded too loud, then they tried to tone it down but the final product still came out distorted. Either the sound track on the episodes had begun to deteriorate, or Shout Factory screwed up. It will be interesting to see how many of the 23 remaining episodes have this problem. I have another set of the 52 Bill Cosby Show episodes uncut, taped from TV and from 16mm film. There are no sound issues on any of those.

Everything considered, it's good that Shout Factory made The Bill Cosby Show available. Some episodes seem to have sound issues, but the episodes look great and are uncut. Hopefully there won't be a long delay for the release of season two.

[Mr. Television]

Yea I just watched the first 2 episodes and the sound on episode 2 was a little fuzzy at times. I mainly got the show because I never saw it and this was the only way I was going to be able to.