Good Price for First-Season DVDs

I happened to notice that FK's first-season DVDs are presently just $12.49 USD on Amazon US, $17.69 CDN on Amazon Canada, and €9.99 EUR on Amazon Germany.

That's $0.57/episode USD — much cheaper than streaming, and cheaper than the other seasons on DVD, too. If you still lack it, consider snagging it before the price goes back up!

Yes, the German cuts are longer (but not racier)

In a conversation elsewhere, sholio was surprised to learn that FK's German first-season DVDs have more footage (~1-6* minutes/episode) than the North American DVDs. They do.

Before North American fans got access to the German cuts — this was before international online fandom as we know it today — the rumor was that the German versions were "racy" (with nudity) because the cast and crew told us that they'd filmed some such scenes. But when we saw the German cuts, we discovered that the extra footage was mostly longer establishing shots (panning down a street, up a building, across the desks in the precinct, around a crime scene, Nick stuck in his loft in the daytime, the Caddy on the road). There is a little extra dialogue, but only a little. My favorite extra scene is Nick with a book. (We don't know what happened to the "racy" footage.)

FK being FK, though, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Not only did FK's first season air at different lengths in different places, but sometimes the shortest cuts included footage that doesn't appear in the longest cuts! For example, the original CBS airing of "False Witness" (as eventually repeated on the Chiller cable channel) is the shortest version of all, but it has two (2!) extra scenes with the rookie cop who toasts Nick, scenes which do not appear in any of the other cuts. And of course the "ghost!Erica in the Caddy" scene in "Last Act" was in some versions and not others, as well as the rape in the "Dead Issue" flashback, off the top of my head. The "False Witness" exchange between Nick and Lacroix about music and souls isn't on the North American DVDs but was on the original US airing. In VHS days, people might argue interpretations for a long time before realizing that they had actually seen slightly different stories.

First-season, from the longest cut to the shortest:

1. original German airing / German DVDs
2. original Canadian airing (in some locations) / North American DVDs
3. later Canadian airings (in some locations)
4. SciFi Channel airing
5. original CBS US airing / Chiller airing

When first season first aired in the US, the "Crimetime After Primetime" rotation had a weird, truncated time slot after the late-night news (this was before they hired David Letterman; Letterman displaced "Crimetime," leading to FK's first cancellation and hiatus). That's why those episodes were so short that they sometimes "patched" the omissions with other scenes. The SciFi Channel airings were trimmed to fit in more commercials.

Here's my post from when I first got the German DVDs: 2010-04-23: "An Incredible Gift: The German DVDs."

* Numbers amended to include "Dark Knight," both halves of which are longer in German than any other episodes.