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Welcome to How to Spend $20, BOP’s look at the latest Blu-ray discs and DVDs to hit stores nationwide. This week: A maenad instigates a wild sex party, Community’s Donald Glover solves a murder case and Viggo Mortensen hits The Road.

Pick of the Week

For people who want something to sink their teeth into: True Blood: The Complete Second Season

Sure, the whole vampire thing was a good hook, but what really got me watching True Blood in the first place was that Alan Ball created it. I feel like I’ve praised the man enough times on this website alone, and yet I’ll allow one more ego boost for the creator of my favorite TV show (Six Feet Under) and, probably, favorite movie (American Beauty). Ball is a fantastic storyteller, and perhaps even better at creating meaningful characters with depth and, well, life. If this weren’t true, then how else do you explain my (and just about everyone else’s) heartbreak at the conclusion of the Six Feet Under finale? I can’t say any other TV show has ever affected me on that kind of level.

What I find even more amazing about True Blood is that while it’s a very different animal from what we’re used to seeing from Ball, True Blood is also a television show that I can’t imagine anyone else would do quite like Ball. True Blood is popcorn television at its best. It’s campy, it’s sexy, it’s got vampires and shapeshifters and other mythical creatures. And as nutso as some of its storylines transform into, True Blood at its heart is a compelling character drama – a miraculous achievement, considering the show throws so much ridiculousness back at you to have you believing otherwise.

The stakes raised considerably in True Blood’s second season, with two storylines taking over a majority of the season’s runtime. In one, Eric enlists the help of Sookie and Bill to investigate the disappearance of Godric, a 2,000-year-old vampire sheriff. Their search leads them to Dallas, where Jason (Sookie’s brother) is coincidentally discovering new meaning in his life via a church that despises vampires. In the second, a maenad named Maryann lands in Bon Temps and influences destructive evil in the town and its residents. She could very well be one of the greatest and most dangerous villains ever to grace a season of television.





Fortunately for True Blood (and its fans), we can expect to see many more seasons of the show thanks to True Blood’s ratings surge in its second season. A then-record 2.67 million tuned in for the penultimate episode of the show’s first season. That figure was destroyed by the season two premiere, which was watched by 3.7 million in its original airing – a 38% bump. Viewership would peak at 5.3 million viewers for season two’s 10th episode – a 98.5% increase over season one’s largest audience. Factoring in repeat airings of original episodes during the week they premiere, season two episodes averaged 12.4 million viewers a week, good enough to be HBO’s most watched series since The Sopranos.

Disc includes: Character Perspectives featurette, Pro Anti-Vampire Feeds featurette, The Vampire Report: Special Edition featurette, Fellowship of the Sun: Reflections of Light featurette, seven audio commentaries

For people who don’t find The Hardy Boys all that hysterical: Mystery Team

Derrick Comedy, an Internet sketch comedy group consisting of Dominic Dierkes, DC Pierson and Community’s Donald Glover, took a break from their web roots in early 2008 to work on their first feature film. That film would turn out to be Mystery Team, a 94-minute movie that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and was released in just one domestic theater in the fall. Through demands at eventful.com – the same website that enabled Paranormal Activity to become a phenomenon – Mystery Team enjoyed a lengthy run in the States, including an engagement in New York City beginning in December.

Even so, Mystery Team would tally just $89 thousand in domestic theaters. Perhaps the movie will see more green on DVD.

In Mystery Team, three “kid” detectives who are about to graduate high school decide to take on the biggest case of their lives – a double homicide – to prove to their town that they can be “real detectives.” This would be a giant departure from the small crimes they’re used to solving. Supporting players include Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan and The Office’s Ellie Kemper.

Disc includes: Audio commentary, The Making Of featurette, Who is Wally Cummings? comedy short, gag reel, deleted scenes, Pre-Production Test Scene featurette, Sword Club featurette

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