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Good Neighbors - The Complete Final Season
Acorn Media // Unrated // May 7, 2002
List Price: $39.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The clash of opposites is always a favorite theme of comedy, and the British television series Good Neighbors (originally called The Good Life in Britain) takes on the theme of neighbors who may find it difficult to be conventionally "neighborly." Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall) have decided to opt out of the rat race and live a life of self-sufficiency in their suburban London home, complete with garden, goats, pigs, chickens, and a manure-fed generator. Their next-door neighbors, Margo and Jerry Leadbetter (Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington) are as opposite as can be, with Jerry going off to work in his London office while the always-elegant Margo lords it over the Pony Club and her music circle.
The first DVD release of Good Neighbors, which ran from 1975 to 1978, is of the show's fourth and final season. It is indeed rather odd that the first season to be released on DVD be the final season, but given the episodic nature of the series, it really doesn't appear to make much of a difference. I had never seen any episodes before starting with this set, and within the first few minutes of the first episode on the disc I knew all that I needed to know about the series' premise. Each 30-minute episode takes place in the tiny social circle of the two couples: the Goods as they try to work out how to live self-sufficiently, and their off-the-wall friendship with the Leadbetters, who turn a bemused eye to the whole endeavor. Probably the only development over the course of the series is in fact that by the fourth season the two couples are friends, though of course the basic rivalry remains and is constantly played up for comic effect.
I was intrigued by the premise of Good Neighbors, and I can't help but wonder how the characters were perceived in the late 1970s when the show was first aired, and how they might be perceived differently today. Personally, of the two sets of couples, I identify firmly with the Goods, who are trying to live a life out of the rat race, rather than the overly class-conscious Leadbetters. But will viewers today see the Goods as intrepid (if slightly oddball) pioneers of a worthwhile way of life, or as laughable members of the lunatic fringe? It's hard to say, though I'd hope for the former.
In terms of entertainment value, the important question is whether or not Good Neighbors is consistently funny. I'd put them firmly in the "average situation comedy" category, as the fourth-season episodes don't seem to do anything particularly outstanding with their material. Much is made of Tom and Barbara Good being rather excitable in contrast to the calm and statuesque Margo and there's a great deal of shrieking and running around to generate laughs. Is it funny? I found some of it to be mildly amusing, but all in all I wasn't terribly impressed. Viewers who tend to enjoy situation comedies in general will most likely find Good Neighbors more to their taste than mine.
Video
I'm afraid that any fans who have been waiting for Good Neighbors to come out on DVD will find themselves very disappointed by the video quality. The image overall looks strikingly like it was badly compressed, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since each of the set's two discs only holds four half-hour episodes: hardly enough to cause compression problems. Yet the picture is frequently shimmery, and there are consistent haloes around people and objects as well as occasional artifacts that pop up. In addition to that, the image is blurry, putting Good Neighbors distinctly below average even for a television show of its age.
Audio
The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack is adequate, considering that the show is essentially dialogue-based. The main disappointment is that there's no option to watch the episodes without the laugh track (a feature that appears, for instance, in Fox's DVDs of M*A*S*H). As it is, there's the usual problem of laughter covering over portions of lines, apart from the fact that I don't like laugh tracks to begin with, of course.
Extras
Good Neighbors is packaged in a colorful two-disc boxed set. Disc 1 contains four episodes, cast and crew biographies, and a ten-minute interview with Bob Larbey, the writer and co-creator of the series. Disc 2 contains three regular episodes plus the "Command Performance," a special episode filmed in front of a live studio audience that included the Queen of England. For this episode, there's about ten minutes of introductory material featuring the Queen arriving, being introduced to various members of the BBC, and having the actors introduced. The Command Performance episode itself is nothing out of the ordinary.
There are no chapter stops in the individual episodes, unfortunately: each is a single chapter.
Final thoughts
Though I admit to being personally unimpressed, Good Neighbors was highly successful in its initial four-year run in Britain, so obviously there's an audience out there for this kind of mild situation comedy. I'd certainly recommend renting this set first if you're considering it, either to find out if you like it enough to own it, or (if you already know that you like it) if the video quality is acceptable to you.
The first DVD release of Good Neighbors, which ran from 1975 to 1978, is of the show's fourth and final season. It is indeed rather odd that the first season to be released on DVD be the final season, but given the episodic nature of the series, it really doesn't appear to make much of a difference. I had never seen any episodes before starting with this set, and within the first few minutes of the first episode on the disc I knew all that I needed to know about the series' premise. Each 30-minute episode takes place in the tiny social circle of the two couples: the Goods as they try to work out how to live self-sufficiently, and their off-the-wall friendship with the Leadbetters, who turn a bemused eye to the whole endeavor. Probably the only development over the course of the series is in fact that by the fourth season the two couples are friends, though of course the basic rivalry remains and is constantly played up for comic effect.
I was intrigued by the premise of Good Neighbors, and I can't help but wonder how the characters were perceived in the late 1970s when the show was first aired, and how they might be perceived differently today. Personally, of the two sets of couples, I identify firmly with the Goods, who are trying to live a life out of the rat race, rather than the overly class-conscious Leadbetters. But will viewers today see the Goods as intrepid (if slightly oddball) pioneers of a worthwhile way of life, or as laughable members of the lunatic fringe? It's hard to say, though I'd hope for the former.
In terms of entertainment value, the important question is whether or not Good Neighbors is consistently funny. I'd put them firmly in the "average situation comedy" category, as the fourth-season episodes don't seem to do anything particularly outstanding with their material. Much is made of Tom and Barbara Good being rather excitable in contrast to the calm and statuesque Margo and there's a great deal of shrieking and running around to generate laughs. Is it funny? I found some of it to be mildly amusing, but all in all I wasn't terribly impressed. Viewers who tend to enjoy situation comedies in general will most likely find Good Neighbors more to their taste than mine.
Video
I'm afraid that any fans who have been waiting for Good Neighbors to come out on DVD will find themselves very disappointed by the video quality. The image overall looks strikingly like it was badly compressed, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since each of the set's two discs only holds four half-hour episodes: hardly enough to cause compression problems. Yet the picture is frequently shimmery, and there are consistent haloes around people and objects as well as occasional artifacts that pop up. In addition to that, the image is blurry, putting Good Neighbors distinctly below average even for a television show of its age.
Audio
The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack is adequate, considering that the show is essentially dialogue-based. The main disappointment is that there's no option to watch the episodes without the laugh track (a feature that appears, for instance, in Fox's DVDs of M*A*S*H). As it is, there's the usual problem of laughter covering over portions of lines, apart from the fact that I don't like laugh tracks to begin with, of course.
Extras
Good Neighbors is packaged in a colorful two-disc boxed set. Disc 1 contains four episodes, cast and crew biographies, and a ten-minute interview with Bob Larbey, the writer and co-creator of the series. Disc 2 contains three regular episodes plus the "Command Performance," a special episode filmed in front of a live studio audience that included the Queen of England. For this episode, there's about ten minutes of introductory material featuring the Queen arriving, being introduced to various members of the BBC, and having the actors introduced. The Command Performance episode itself is nothing out of the ordinary.
There are no chapter stops in the individual episodes, unfortunately: each is a single chapter.
Final thoughts
Though I admit to being personally unimpressed, Good Neighbors was highly successful in its initial four-year run in Britain, so obviously there's an audience out there for this kind of mild situation comedy. I'd certainly recommend renting this set first if you're considering it, either to find out if you like it enough to own it, or (if you already know that you like it) if the video quality is acceptable to you.
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