Sex and the City-Season 3 (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Menu Animation & Audio Synopsis-Episode Synopses Biographies-Cast & Crew Featurette-3:44 Awards-Awards And Nominations
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	513:56
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered Multi Disc Set (3)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Michael Patrick King Allison Anders Nicole Holofcener Allen Coulter
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Sarah Jessica Parker Kim Cattrall Kristin Davis Cynthia Nixon Chris Noth John Corbett Willie Garson David Eigenberg Kyle MacLachlan
Case	?
RPI	$54.95	Music	Kenneth Burgomaster Douglas J. Cuomo Tom Findlay

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Full Frame	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	None
16x9 Enhancement	No
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.33:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Czech Danish German Greek Spanish French Italian Dutch Norwegian Portuguese Swedish	Smoking	Yes, heavy
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The third season of Sex and the City sees the show in full swing.

    Because it has been quite a while since I reviewed Sex and the City Season 2, I'll recap my brief descriptions of the ladies at the centre of the show:

• Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) — our first-person narrator. She's a heavy smoker, and even more addicted to shoes.
• Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) — willing to sleep with almost anyone, providing the sex is good.
• Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) — a successful lawyer, but less successful in her private life.
• Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) -— runs an art gallery. She's a little naive, a little more prudish than the others, but optimistic and easy to like.

    There are some men who show up regularly in this season:

• Big (Chris Noth) — Carrie's ex-lover, who broke her heart when he moved to Paris, met another woman, Natasha (Bridget Moynahan), and married her
• Steve Brady (David Eigenberg) — a bar-tender who is Miranda's live-in lover
• Aidan Shaw (John Corbett) — a furniture maker
• Standford Blatch (Willie Garson) — Carrie's close gay male friend
• Trey MacDougal (Kyle MacLachlan) — a rich doctor

    The episodes in this season are:

    There is a huge variation in running time from one episode to another (23:16 to 34:25)— no other TV show displays such a variation. I also wonder if they shoot two episodes at a time — in all but one case above a pair of episodes is directed by the same director.

    Carrie's battle with giving up cigarettes in this season is conveyed convincingly. I've heard it said that nicotine is more addictive than heroin — Carrie makes a strong case for that.

    I found myself irritated to see Big cropping up again. I was feeling like yelling at Carrie: "get over it!". But that's what Sex and the City is about. It's not so much about the bits of relationships that we get right; it's about the bits we get wrong. There are so many ways to go wrong, and this show explores all of them. And although no one could ever describe this show as a morality play, it's surprising how many of the storylines have some kind of a moral to them.

    If you have enjoyed any Sex and the City episodes, then you will probably like these — this is one of the better seasons of the show.

Video

    This transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, not 16x9 enhanced. That's the way it is screened on TV.

    The image is generally grainy, with the occasional moments of clarity, but only in close-ups; there are also a few moments where the picture is definitely out-of-focus. The result is a picture that's rather soft. Shadow detail is not good. Darker colours have no details at all. This makes night-time scenes difficult to make out. There is no obvious low-level noise.

    Colour is vivid and strong, not so much in the New York landscape, but in some of the clothes. The colours are often rendered well, but sometimes skin tones come out rather more orange than they should.

    There are no obvious film artefacts. There's no aliasing of any significance, and no shimmer. There are no MPEG artefacts.

    There are subtitles in twelve languages, including English. I watched the English subtitles on several episode. I spotted a number of errors: such as at 18:15 in Running With Scissors, where the subtitle reads "can a hug get you...", but the dialogue is "can a hoagie be...", or at 22:46 in No Ifs, Ands, or Butts, where the subtitle says: "you were rough", but the dialogue is "you were robbed".

    Each disc is single-sided, dual layer. As far as I can tell, they have arranged the six episodes per disc so that there are three episodes per layer.

    They still haven't bothered to put chapter stops in the episodes. Shame.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, all Dolby Digital 2.0. I only listened to the English. It's Dolby Digital 2.0, and marked as surround-encoded — I heard nothing from the surrounds, so I suspect that the only impact of the surround-encoding is to dump the dialogue into the centre channel speakers.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand. There are no audio sync problems in any of the episodes.

    There is no credit for the score on these episodes; there is one for music supervision, which goes to Dan Lieberstein.

    Neither the subwoofer nor the surrounds get anything to do.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menus are animated with music. They are easy to understand, and easy to use

Synopses

    Every episode is accessed from a menu screen which gives a synopsis of the episode, and lists the writer and the director.

Cast and Crew Bios — Disc One

    We get bios for:

• Sarah Jessica Parker (14pp)

• Kim Cattrall (6pp)

• Kristin Davis (6pp)

• Cynthia Nixon (7pp)

• Chris Noth (5pp)

• John Corbett (5pp)

• Kyle MacLachlan (6pp)

• David Eigenberg (4pp)

• Willie Garson (4pp)

• Darren Star (4pp)

• Michael Patrick King (4pp)

Featurette (3:44) — Disc Two

    This is really nothing more than a long trailer for the show. It seems like it was shot very early; it refers to "the new comedy series".

Awards and Nominations — Disc Three

    A lot of pages recounting the various awards for the show has been nominated for, and the considerable number it won for Season Three, including the Emmy and Golden Globes for best comedy series, plus awards from the Producers Guild, Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Make Up and Hairstylists Guild — I was waiting to see if they had any "guild" issues...

    The Region 1 version is quite similar to the Region 4, and offers pretty much the same extras. There is no big difference in the transfers.

    There is no reason to prefer one version over the other — you can be happy with either.

    Season Three's episodes, presented on three so-so DVDs.

    The video quality is not bad, even with the grain, and the inadequate shadow detail.

    The audio quality is fine.

    The extras are fewer in number than the previous season, which is a bit disappointing.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall