Last week Fox Home Entertainment
announced that
Defying Gravity is coming to DVD as a 4-disc set, available on
January 19th. The show aired in the states on ABC, and even though the network is being coy about the status of the series, there is ample evidence that the program has been canceled:
this report about the show's set being torn down ("
the grinding of band saws, the pounding of sledgehammers") and destroyed, plus show creator James Parriott
confirming that "
the actors have all been released and the sets have been destroyed, so the show is “pretty much dead” - no real hope now of seeing the show get the CPR it needs to continue on into another season".
So with last week's announcement, it was strange for us (not to mention confusing to fans, hoping to get ANY sign of hope) that the title on the box was shown as "
Defying Gravity - The Complete 1st Season": usually that means there will be more than one season, right? However, we can think of several exceptions to that, naturally; the one that comes most easily to mind is a particular 2007 Michelle Ryan series, which didn't get more than 8 episodes but had them all on a DVD set titled
Bionic Woman - Volume 1. What's in a name?
This morning one of our retailer contacts, who incidentally loved the show, told us that there's evidence that Fox could indeed be changing the title of the DVD release in any case. A low-resolution graphic has been provided to retailers, meant to be used in their weekly circular ads. We've got a look at it for you below, thank to our contact. This revised art may not be final yet, but instead of mentioning either a first season OR a complete series, it uses the same key art but simply shows the title as "
Defying Gravity" now, with a banner across that top to promote that the release "Includes 5 Unaired Episodes".
Here at TVShowsOnDVD, we don't think this is the final artwork version yet, though. Fox is distributing this release in both the USA and Canada, and in Canada there were no "unaired episodes". The show ran for 8 episodes on ABC in the United States, but in Canada it ran for 9 episodes on CTV, then the last four episodes were aired a few weeks later on the Space channel up there. Fox could have different package variations for the USA and Canada, but it's a more common practice to use a sticker to promote this sort of thing (and easy to just not use the same sticker for Canadian copies). This is a long way of explaining why we think this art will change again...and who knows, maybe they'll squeeze in pics of the other 2 astronauts on the cover! But for now, here's the latest version per our friendly retail contact, to whom we're grateful:
