Well the story is fine, the cinematography as good as you would expect from a large budget show (although there’s a little too much digital noise in some of the darker scenes), the sound excellent. What’s not to like ?
The formatting of the BD disks themselves of course. Whilst the actual content is pretty good, the way that it has been put together sucks. You can tell those putting it together tried pretty hard to make the blueray experience feature filled, but they forgot the one real reason why people buy boxed sets. They buy them to watch the show.
And too much gets in the way of that :-
- There’s an especially irritating piracy warning. If I dare to pirate the disks, the FBI will apparently use extraordinary rendition to kidnap me from the UK and fine me $250,000! If there is anything more irritating than those pointless anti-piracy messages, then it is an anti-piracy message that has not been “localised” – people get more than a little annoyed by US-orientated messages.
- We get an annoying little message from the director about how good the disks are. This would be bad enough if it only appeared without our requesting it once, but it seems to show up every time you change the disc for the next one!
- Similarly when you start playing an episode on a new disc, you get an annoying pop-up warning you that certain features will only work if you have a recent blueray player. It is the wrong place! If certain features won’t work it will be noticeable more in the menu than in the playback!