DVDs of the Year

6. Family Seasons 1 and 2
The least heralded, most valuable TV-to-DVD excavation of the year. This 1976-80 drama — exec-produced by Mike Nichols and Aaron Spelling — was a quiet stunner, a portrait of an upper-middle-class Pasadena family: parents Kate and Doug Lawrence (Sada Thompson and James Broderick) and their three problematic children — flighty single mom Nancy (Meredith Baxter), dreamy would-be writer Willie (Gary Frank), and tomboy teen Buddy (Kristy McNichol). All gave remarkably nuanced performances (Thompson, Frank, and McNichol won Emmys) with scripts that, at their best, recall John Updike and John Cheever short stories.

7. Pretty Poison
This nifty little cult film is lifted into near-greatness by Tuesday Weld's performance as a radiantly sexy high school majorette who tricks an understandably gaga Anthony Perkins into helping her commit murder. Set in a small Massachusetts mill town, Pretty Poison unfolds like a literary thriller, contains a few scenes in which black comedy blends seamlessly with white-knuckle tension, and sustains an air of eerily calm menace throughout. Thanks to then-novice director Noel Black and the enthusiastic work of Weld and Perkins (as an arsonist freshly released from a mental institution), Poison carries a jolting erotic charge.

8. Perry Mason Volumes 1 and 2
Taken together, these two DVD collections comprise the brilliant first season (1957-58) of the legal trials won by novelist Erle Stanley Gardner's politely ferocious defense attorney. It was the TV show that turned Raymond Burr, previously known as a film-noir heavy, into a suave (if still hefty) leading man. Burr's achievement, as the critic Dave Hickey has observed, was ''to seduce us...into the idea of genuine trust, and the possibility of innocence, and the dream of a job worth doing.'' The debut season featured supporting turns by actors as varied as Fay Wray and future Sam Peckinpah stock player L.Q. Jones, who, as a country lothario in ''The Case of the Lonely Heiress,'' gets conked on the head by a gal pal and swan-dives to the floor with a thunk so convincing you'd swear he went unconscious for real.

9. Billy Wilder Speaks
Asked if he'd have made movies even if he hadn't gotten paid, the great Austrian director (Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard) sputters, ''What you think, I'm a sucker for a punch?'' Blunt, corrosively funny, and utterly uninhibited in talking about technique, studio politics, and casting, Wilder, at age 83, was interviewed by director Volker Schlöndorff. Wilder's contempt for studio heads will thrill any viewer with an overbearing boss, and his matter-of-fact approach to filmmaking will resonate with any working stiff, which is what Wilder considered himself — a proudly rich working stiff, he makes clear. Good trivia abounds: Did you know that, while casting Sunset Boulevard, instead of Gloria Swanson and William Holden, Wilder wanted Mae West and Montgomery Clift? Wild-er!

10. South Park The Hits, Volume 1
If you admire this minimally animated, maximally ideated series without being an assiduous collector, this is the perfect collection: two discs of episodes chosen by creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker as their personal favorites. Their picks lean more toward recent editions of the series, but I agree with them that their takedowns of Lord of the Rings fandom, Tom Cruise silliness, and Paris Hilton's very existence are some of the funniest work they've ever done. Extras include the 1995 original short ''The Spirit of Christmas,'' which won Parker and Stone their initial fame.

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