Screenhead is very excited to announce the winner of the In Plain Sight giveaway valued at $130.00!  Karen Dittrich is the winner and Karen says, “Great Giveaway. Thank you for the opportunity.”  You are very welcome Karen. We hope you enjoy the giveaway.

In Plain Sight started its fourth season on Sunday, May 1 at 10/9c on USA Network.  In Plain Sight stars Mary McCormack as Mary Shannon, a U.S. Marshal working in the highly secretive branch of the witness protection program (WITSEC), who relocates Federal Witnesses, most of whom fall into three categories: career criminals, whistle-blowers or innocents who had the misfortune of witnessing a crime.  They all have one thing in common – someone wants them dead.  Mary’s job is to see that doesn’t happen, while at the same time attempting to manage her own funky family. In the upcoming season, Marshall will have a new love interest; Brandi gets engaged to Peter, and Mary reluctantly helps plan the wedding!  Visit the official In Plain Sight website when you get a chance.

Check out what Karen won!

We’ve seen a lot of versions of the Robin Hood story. Multiple movies, a cartoon featuring anthropomorphic animals from Disney, at least one television series from the folks at BBC, and now, Acorn Media sent out a copy of one more: Robin of Sherwood.

Robin of Sherwood takes us back, way back, to the whole medieval period of England back before it was an empire. Young Robin, following the death of his father, has to grow up and take up the mantle of the resistance against the oppressive regime of the Sheriff of Nottingham and the like. But this time, it won’t be just archery that runs the day here, but also just a little magic getting thrown in to make this a really rather full featured experience.

Seriously, I don’t remember the last time I saw magic figure in heavily to a dose of Robin Hood, and this one actually does a nice job. The soundtrack is a bit weird, heavy on the synthesizer, but then I discovered that this was originally made back in 1984, well, then it suddenly made a lot of sense.

One problem I had with Robin of Sherwood is that the subtitles only occasionally match the dialogue. This isn’t a huge problem, you understand, but really rather irksome. Aside from that, it’s definitely a winner. It’s a huge, sprawling epic lasting fully seven hundred minutes (or just short of twelve hours), and this is just Set One.

I was very impressed by this. Some of Acorn’s stuff, especially their older stuff, has shown its age. But Robin of Sherwood is not only a fine presentation for an English television show from the eighties, but has a downright timeless quality to it that’s not only surprising but welcome.

Folks, if you’ve got any love at all for the Robin Hood mythos, you’re absolutely going to love Robin of Sherwood. It’s terrific stuff, well acted, well put together, and downright credible. It’s a treat. A downright treat to watch, minor subtitle issues aside, and it’s not every day I find something that I can actually refer to as a treat.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands over a full ten, once again (we’ve had a lot of those lately, and while I’m glad to see it it still doesn’t quite sit right), out of ten to Robin of Sherwood, a series that’s going to put on a fantastic show with terrific performances, credible plotlines, annoying synthesizer music, and all the action you could hope for from an installment of Robin Hood.

You remember, not so long ago, when we covered Ice Road Truckers. Well, the folks out at the History Channel have stepped up the game, and they sent a copy of IRT: Deadliest Roads for me to review. And if the Ice Road left your  blood running cold, rest assured, Deadliest Roads will blow your mind.

IRT: Deadliest Roads takes us from the Dalton, or the Ice Road, in the frozen north to the wilds of India, where some of the Ice Road drivers find themselves in a whole new world. Driving trucks with wooden frames in highly dense traffic onto nightmarishly tight mountain passes to conduct valuable goods to hydroelectric construction projects in the areas around the Himalayas.

Where Ice Road Truckers made your blood run cold with endless expanses of white and cold and ice and worse, IRT: Deadliest Roads makes things even worse by offering a whole new set of hazards. For instance, you might remember Alex as the “King of the Ice Road”, a man who made all sorts of deliveries down the hazardous Dalton. But here, he manages to have multiple accidents before even leaving New Delhi. There are incredibly tight mountain passes that crumble before your very eyes, three-figure temperatures, and trucks that develop weird mechanical problems at a drop of a hat.

Seeing how people drive in India is also somewhat of an unusual cultural experience. I hate driving in major cities myself, but driving in India would likely drive me…insane.  Watching them crawl over these hairsbreadth passages, sometimes in the dark, surrounded by the twisted metal wreckage of other cars is a harrowing experience unlike any other.

And yet, the Ice Road Truckers manage to pull off load after load. And frankly, it’s hard to believe they do it. I tell you this, even just the first episode wracked my nerves pretty good just watching it. When Lisa–you’ll remember her from the original History Channel program too–actually said “I want to go home to the Dalton, where it’s safe”, I knew we were up against something fundamentally different than anything we’d seen before. And we were.

Folks, you’ve got to see this to believe it, and if you haven’t already seen it, this is exactly what you need to see. It’s mind-bending, nerve-wracking stuff, and frankly, I got goosebumps on more than one occasion.

If you want a terrifying experience in some downright beautiful scenery, this is exactly where you need to be.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives IRT: Deadliest Roads a full ten out of ten for giving us an experience I thought would never come out of television: actual scares.

The folks out at Comedy Central packed up a copy of South Park: The Complete Fourteenth Season for me to review for you, and here’s the surprise–this is terrific stuff.

South Park: The Complete Fourteenth Season takes us back to South Park where, once again, we will have ourselves a time. Friendly faces everywhere, humble folks without temptation…well, actually, there’s plenty of temptation as Randy faces his addiction to the Food Network, and marijuana. Cartman will face the many, many, many sins of his past as both himself and as his anti-heroic alter ego The Coon. Even Kenny and Kyle will discover tragedies in their past in this thoroughly epic and thoroughly comic season.

It’s hard not to find something to laugh at here. Whether you favor political comedy, movie parody, or just the utterly ridiculous (when you watch half the men of South Park trying to get their hands on medical marijuana, and the results of same, it’s just a sight to see. Really. You must see this.), you’re going to find something big here.

But where the fourteenth season of South Park really does well is in its epic multi-episode shows. There are two sets of them here, and that’s two more than the previous season offered. Not only will we get the three-part epic known as Coon 2: Hindsight (followed promptly by Mysterion Rises in which we find out the secret identity of Mysterion, and Coon Vs. Coon And Friends, in which Cartman co-opts Cthulhu. And you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to type that.), but we’ll also get the two-part epic 200 / 201, the special two hundredth episode of South Park in which most of the past comes back to haunt the town, from Mecha Streisand to Moses from Jewbilee to the grand question of just who Eric Cartman’s father is (protip: it’s not his mom).

If you’ve ever enjoyed South Park, the fourteenth season will give you everything you wanted to see and then some. If you’ve never enjoyed South Park, you’re probably not reading this anyway. But know this –you’re missing out.

This is one of the best seasons of South Park in recent memory, and it’s going to have loads of laughs. It’s better if you understand all the source material (get better acquainted with early South Park, Jersey Shore, NASCAR and comic books for some of the best jokes), but it’s still got lots to love all by itself.

The Screenhead Ten Scale knows when it’s been beaten and gives South Park: The Complete Fourteenth Season a ten out of ten. There’s so much in here that’s great that it’s hard not to give it full marks, if for no other reason than spectacular value. So if you haven’t already seen it–even if you already have–you’ll want to catch it again.

And it’s back to Colorado Springs for us, folks–the cattlehands out at A&E sent over a copy of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman The Complete Season Three for us to tangle with, and this time, it’s their biggest season yet.

Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman The Complete Season Three reunites us with Dr. Michaela Quinn, who’s been having a rough time of things. First her father dies, putting an end to their father / daughter medical practice in Boston, then she sets out for Colorado Springs, answering an ad in their newspaper looking for a doctor. But when she finds that they only hired her because they thought she was a man, this begins a long, strange journey in which Dr. Quinn tries desperately to be accepted by the townsfolk. And in her third season, she’ll be facing still more discrimination, not only for her, but also for her friends and her newfound family.

Is anyone else getting sick of how often this show bangs the discrimination drum? I mean, sure, the first season or two, okay, but for crying out loud, they really didn’t need to bring in more people to get discrimated against. Sure, out there in the wilds of Colorado Springs, things are kind of backward. Slavery ended like twenty minutes ago and the people think indoor plumbing is a kind of witchcraft, but still.

Though I do have to hand it to them–they are clearly growing this series. You remember how my biggest point on the last two seasons was that this is a very restful series? Well, that hasn’t changed…but they will advance. That’s what’s impressive about this series–it has continuity. It’s largely episodic in nature, sure, but the viewer who takes his (or her, depending) time with this series will be rewarded by a fairly rich experience.

Last season they were slogging their way through mud in the street, and now they’re looking to get the railroad in. This is the kind of thing you’ll find here, when they can stop talking about discrimination for more than ten minutes at a clip. Seriously, when discrimination is this equal-opportunity–old people, young people, women, Indians, the Chinese–is it really discrimination any more?

It’s an impressive experience, though, and this could be a good sign for future seasons. It’s got its problems, sure enough–rickety in spots and weak in others–but it’s still a fairly deep experience, and it makes perfect sense that this lasted as long as it did.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman the Complete Season Three an eight out of ten for improving on its earlier performances, but not being without its flaws.

So we all had a pretty nice time with the sweet shot of retro that was the first season of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. Well, bare your upper arm for another jab because we’ve got a fresh round of frontier medicine right here; the folks out at A&E sent over a copy of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman The Complete Season Two for us to review, and we’ve got plenty of backward hicks who can’t believe a woman can sew limbs instead of clothes, along with bizarre Indian behavior and, of course, more of that blended family drama.

Once again, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman The Complete Season Two hauls us back out to scenic jerkwater Colorado, where a woman is now tending to the doctoring of the entire town of Colorado Springs and its surroundings. And with the people of Colorado Springs now a lot more comfortable than they were at the thought of a woman doctor–but still not fully satisfied yet–Dr. Mike, as she’s known, will have a whole different set of problems to tackle. Sure, there will be plenty of medical whatnot going on here, but there will be issues with the Indians and, of course, a whole lot of that old fashioned prejudice going around.

The pacing of this second season is somewhat different–it’s not quite as restful as the first season was. It’s a little more frantic, a little more active. They’re finding their stride, I think, and trying to do a little more with the world they set up back in the first season. Sure, it’s not the most surprising thing you’ll see, but it will bring a lot more action with it than you might have expected.

So if you tried the first season and found it wanting–a little too sedate for your tastes–you might fare better with the second season. The performances are all pretty solid, and as a Western, this is actually pretty believable. Admittedly, there will be some episodes here you don’t like, and some you do–that’s the nature of a box set. But overall, you’ll do pretty well here.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, in turn, gives Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman The Complete Season Two a seven out of ten for being a satisfying experience. Though it’s a bit slow, it will still serve you well on those nights you want to just kick up your feet with a cup of coffee and relax with a shot of retro Western television from the folks out at A&E.

Anyone else like cake?  That’s not exactly a difficult question, is it? Most people like cake, and that’s why today’s review is exciting. The folks out at TLC sent over a copy of Cake Boss: Season 3 for us to review, and it will be a wonderful mix of cake, comedy, and even a little drama.

Cake Boss: Season 3 will take us to Carlo’s Bakery, currently the purview of one Buddy Valastro and his rather extensive family, along with some extra employees, of course, some of which come and go throughout the season. And the crew out at Carlo’s Bakery will make some impressively involved pastries. But this won’t just be a cake experience; you’ll get to see how these cakes are assembled from start to finish, as well as some background information and the like. And then we’ll have family drama in there, as well as some good old fashioned comedy.

Cake Boss: Season 3 is a surprisingly rich and varied experience–sure, at the end of the day, it’s basically a lot of footage of cakes getting made–but despite the singular nature of what’s going on here, there are so many variations on the concept that it’s actually a big surprise to see what’s going to happen next. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a cake with plumbing before. Thanks to Cake Boss: Season 3, I will see just that.

And I said once already there will be a lot of laughs here. But even I didn’t think there would be quite so many. Sure, I had a couple good laughs in the beginning, but it kept right on going, and by the end of it all, I had laughed myself crazy.

This is almost a sitcom more than it is a documentary, but when you get this many laughs into a show about cake, and then top it off by making it an educational experience (yes, you will learn–they have a couple segments worth of cake history, how cake used to be done, what kinds of cakes were big back when, and so on), well, you’ve got something here of the kind of thing you don’t normally see on television. And the kind of thing that will be well worth your time to check out.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Cake Boss: Season 3 a nine out of ten. Though it’s somewhat repetitive in nature–it’s all about cake, after all–they will find so many different ways to present the same thing that it seldom gets old. And that makes Cake Boss something downright delicious to watch from TLC.

Sometimes there are people out there with strange capabilities–unusual flexibility, abnormal strength, and so on. And while they’re not necessarily as obvious as the super heroes and villains of comic books, they’re still definitely out of the ordinary. And that’s exactly what Stan Lee’s Superhumans Season One will take a look at, and we’ll take a look at that, thanks to the folks out at the History Channel, who sent over a copy for us.

Stan Lee’s Superhumans sends a “superhuman” of sorts–Daniel Browning Smith, regarded as the world’s most flexible man–out on a grand quest to discover others like him. Not necessarily flexible men and women, but rather, those strange folks who can do the unusual, even the downright impossible. Here, you’ll get eight episodes filled with these people. You won’t just get them, though–you’ll get their stories. You’ll discover how they first discovered their capabilities, what they do with these feats, and so on.

They’ll go to great lengths to make clear to you, if you actually try some of the stuff in this series, you’ll die. I mean, like actually die. The first episode you’ll get follows an Indian gent–like from India–whose body has fully ten times the electrical resistance of a normal human being. Basically, he’s ran an electrical current through himself into a three amp blender. For reference, one amp is sufficient to kill most human beings. Needless to say, the electric Indian did not in fact die.

It continues on like this for several episodes, fully eight hours of this across the two DVD set from the History Channel. It can get a little monotonous, actually, as we go from point to point, thing to thing, different bizarre person to different bizarre person. It’s weird that a show about super-human people should be boring, but this is. I personally blame Browning-Smith’s nigh-constant incredulity at EVERYTHING HE SEES. If there were a drinking game around Stan Lee’s Superhumans that called for you to take a shot every time Browning-Smith said “I can’t believe / understand / comprehend”, you’d probably have to be a superhuman to not die of alcohol poisoning.

Still though, this is some pretty amazing stuff, and things you’ll certainly want to see. It can be a bit dull, but they’ll make up for this by showing you some thoroughly spectacular things.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Stan Lee’s Superhumans Season One a seven out of ten for managing to be both amazing and dull. The combination is bizarre, but still worth a look nonetheless.

Way, way back in the depths of the 1980s–so far back that even I only half-remember it–there was a TV show on NBC (I think it was NBC, anyway) called Highway To Heaven. And in this show, Michael Landon got to once again play the upright sort who went around helping people. And the folks out at A&E got the whole first season together on a huge seven-disc array and sent me out a copy for me to review, and that’s just what we’re doing right now.

Highway to Heaven follows Jonathan Smith, an angel sent down from heaven to do some good things for folks who were in need, and also help improve some of the folks whose souls could stand a bit of shoring up. Smith would go all around, performing these various deeds, and often accompanied by a bitter former police officer. And sometimes, when the situation called for it, Smith has just a little extra angel power in line to get the job done.

Highway to Heaven has a tendency to get a bit schmaltzy at times…okay, maybe a LOT schmaltzy at times…but it’s got an endearing quality, a little bit of an inspirational quality, the kind of uplifting theme that you hardly ever see in television shows today, and the kind of thing that you actually could get from television shows way back in the eighties.

The individual episodes were geared to run an hour each–rather, an hour with commercials, so about forty five minutes–so they do have a tendency to feel a bit over long, wearing out their welcome after a bit. But still, you’ll get that uplifting, feel-good quality out of them, so it’s probably best to take these in small bits, a little at a time, and probably just before bed because these might make you a bit tired, what with wading through all that sentimentality and all. But still, this is some solid work here, and watching it will often make you feel good, which is something that doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should when you watch television.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Highway to Heaven Season One a thoroughly angelic seven out of ten. It’s got its drawbacks–pacing is a big one, and the occasionally over the top nature of the plot is a second–but it will often make you feel good, and this dose of retro joy is, as a result, quite worth it.

The earth is not as stable as we might think. Bits of it are constantly pushing at each other, forcing each other down, and in turn, shape and re-shape the world as we know it. The folks out at the History Channel sent over a copy of How the Earth Was Made: The Complete Season One for review, and no matter what you think about how the planet was actually made, this one will still impress you.

How the Earth Was Made: The Complete Season One will take you all over the world to various bizarre pieces of geology and then explain how a variety of forces–from plate tectonics to gravity–shaped and altered the relevant regions to create these bits of the earth. You’ll see how the various islands of New York came to be, as well as the massive, volatile volcano that is Krakatoa, as well as the deepest point on Earth, the Marianas Trench, and more besides.

Really, this is impressive, if just for the sheer amount of science going on in here. If you’ve got even a vague interest in geology this is going to be a massive primer of some of geology’s greatest hits. Strict creationists, meanwhile, should probably stay away lest they dehydrate themselves from screaming at their televisions.

Seriously, though, this is going for the “old earth” concept at nearly every turn. You’ll hear some variation of “millions of years” in pretty much every episode, and if you don’t subscribe to that particular point of view, you’re not going to be very happy here.

Still, even if you don’t favor the “old earth” point of view, you’ll still have reason to watch this, as you see things you never thought you’d ever see in your lifetime, from underwater vistas to tropical islands to incredible computer simulations of things getting blown up in catastrophic fashions. It’s very much worth watching, and ever better, you can break it up into segments for when you don’t want to spend three hours watching huge lists of episodes. And you’ll have plenty to work with here, too–this sucker weighs in at a whopping ten hours long. The History Channel has done some impressive stuff before, but this one is impressive on a geological level.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives the History Channel’s How the Earth Was Made The Complete Season One an eight out of ten for being philosophically shaky but entertaining with lots of exciting science and explosions to go around. If you’re a geology buff, this is going to be a definite must-see for you.