The other day Universal
announced Law & Order: Trial By Jury - The Complete Series on DVD, scheduled for release on
April 25th. Now the studio has revealed several extras for this legal eagle of a package:
- Cross-over episode "Night" from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
- Deleted Scenes
- Profile on Jerry Orbach
- Profile on Bebe Neuwirth
We reported that this release would be on 3 single-sided DVDs, and we've seen some reactions from the fans who are disbelieving that information, based on the episode count of 13 episodes (14 if you include the bonus
L&O:SVU episode) for an "hour-long" show. They think it's not enough room to fit it all in, and think that there's a mistake in that there ought to either be a fourth disc in the set or else the discs should be double-sided. Well, no. A single-sided, dual-layer DVD can hold around 4 hours of material comfortably. The breakdown of the running times for each disc in this
Trial By Jury package, which Universal has directly provided to us, are:
Disc One: 2 Hours 55 Minutes
Disc Two: 3 Hours 36 Minutes
Disc Three: 2 Hours 50 Minutes (not including bonus episode)
Based on the running time pattern, it's safe to assume a per-disc distribution of 4 episodes, 5 episodes, and 4 episodes (plus bonus ep) respectively. That's all 13 episodes plus the bonus one. Dividing out the disc running times above, that puts each episode's average running time at between 42 and 44 minutes. I don't time my network TV watching with a stopwatch like some of you out there do, but with all the commercials jammed in to broadcasts these days, that average running time sounds about right. So no, there won't need to be another disc and the three discs won't need to be double-sided, not even to hold the just-announced extras. We just wanted to clear up the confusion on that, so we hope noone minds. Stay tuned and we'll keep you abreast of any further developments with this release.
