Remington Steele: Season One (2005)

Though a complete unknown at the start of NBC's madcap mid-'80s mystery series, the second-billed Pierce Brosnan soon became a golden child for the network in Remington Steele: Season One — and for good reason. As the movie-trivia-mad pseudo-sleuth, the future 007 was the perfect foil to Stephanie Zimbalist's type-A private eye. The baby-faced Brosnan also gave the first season its flair — with its rat-a-tat banter and ripped-from-the-MGM-film-vaults plots (the ''In the Steele of the Night'' episode? A clever play on And Then There Were None. ''Steele's Gold''? The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) — making it arguably the best of the series' five-year run. Yeah, you heard me, Mildred Krebs! EXTRAS Disappointingly, Brosnan only pops up during two perfunctory making-of featurettes, and Zimbalist is completely MIA (because she was too. . .busy?). Commentary duty is thus relegated to series cocreators Robert Butler and Michael Gleason, whose remarks tend to be light on the substance (a typical Butler observation: ''That's fun, Pierce scratching himself!'') and heavy on silence. Writer Susan Baskin fares better; she smartly deconstructs ''Vintage Steele,'' one of the set's best episodes, with discussion of wine-producing monks and choreographing dead bodies.