When “Terriers” was heading towards the finish line of its first, only, brilliant, abysmally-rated season, Fienberg and I kept trying to console ourselves and the private eye drama’s other fans with the notion that the series had a clear beginning, middle and end and would live forever beautifully on DVD.
However, there hasn’t been much news on the DVD front since FX announced the cancellation, John Landgraf spoke, I interviewed Ted Griffin, etc. And given that the DVD market has shrunk enough in recent years that not everything gets released anymore, I began to worry. So I checked in with “Terriers” executive producer Shawn Ryan, who’s been busy with the launch of FOX’s “The Chicago Code,” and he had some potentially good news to share.
He said Fox Home Video had financial concerns about producing a “Terriers” DVD, since a low-rated series suggested potential low sales, there won’t be a second season on FX on which they could piggyback their marketing(*), etc.
(*) As Landgraf helped explain to me a while back, that’s the reason DVD sets are released so close to the new season of a show: the home video divisions don’t usually have big marketing budgets, so if they time the release to the TV premiere of the next season, the network winds up doing a lot of the promotion for them.
But, Shawn continued, “after some pressing, Fox Home Video is in talks with a major, major company to do an exclusive ‘Terriers’ DVD release. We’d do commentaries for the eps and extras as well. Unclear right now whether it would be standard DVD, Blu-Ray or both. This deal isn’t finalized yet so I don’t want to say more than that, but things are looking more promising than they were a month ago for a release.”
He added that the show will also be available on Netflix streaming and iTunes, giving fans of the show multiple platforms on which to access it, proselytize to their friends, etc.
I’ll keep you posted when I know more, but I feel much better now about this than I did a few weeks ago.