Private Practice: The Complete First Season Extended Edition Review

Posted by Marilyn Yang on 11.08.2008

The first season of most shows is usually a little shaky. Private Practice does quite well, but how do the bonus features hold up? Is the price worth it for nine episodes? Did anyone watch this who didn't watch Grey's Anatomy first, or wasn't forced by his girlfriend? I try to answer two out of three of these questions.

Starring:
Kate Walsh as Addison Montgomery
Tim Daly as Pete Wilder
Taye Diggs as Sam Bennett
Audra McDonald as Naomi Bennett
Amy Brenneman as Violet Turner
Paul Adelstein as Cooper Freedman
Chris Lowell as William "Dell" Parker
KaDee Strickland as Charlotte King

Private Practice is the spin-off of the popular show Grey's Anatomy. The original Grey's cast member in the spin-off is Dr. Addison Forbes Montgomery (aka Dr. McDreamy's ex-wife, played by Kate Walsh) who moves to Los Angeles to work at Oceanside Wellness Group. The other doctors at the practice are Naomi Bennett (Addison's best friend and old medical school classmate), Sam Bennett (ex-husband of Naomi, also a medical school classmate of Addison's), Cooper Freedman (pediatrician, serial internet dater), Violet Turner (psychiatrist, Cooper's best friend), and Pete Wilder (eastern medicine specialist, aka guy who kissed Addison in the pilot.) Dr. Charlotte King is the Chief of Staff at St. Ambrose Hospital, where Oceanside Wellness patients go when their lives are in imminent danger. This way, there's still a chance for an "Oh my God, we must act now!" adrenaline rush. Unfortunately, the two-part episode "The Other Side of This Life" is also the pilot episode of Private Practice, and is not included in this DVD set. Looks like you'll have to buy Grey's Anatomy season three to get it. There are a few times Addison rants about being a world class neonatal surgeon, which is a little irritating. The show is decent overall, and differs from Grey's because every episode does not begin with the increasingly annoying narration, "As surgeons..." nor end with a closing narration. I watch both Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice regularly, and the general opinion among the fans I know is that Private Practice has less extreme (and unlikely) medical disasters. (On Grey's there was the bomb threat, the ferry crash, most recently the ceiling collapsing on an open abdomen, just to name a few.) Private Practice also has its share of crazy medical moments and drama, such as emergency surgery, babies switched at birth, a kid who is the color blue, a pregnant woman (played by guest star Sara Gilbert) holding up a convenience store who goes into labor. Private Practice also lacks the extreme misery that has been rampant in the more recent seasons of Grey's, making it more lighthearted with some edginess of a medical drama. Basically, consider this Grey's Anatomy lite, showing a good balance between the characters' professional and personal lives. In the off chance that you watched this show without ever having seen Grey's Anatomy at all, Private Practice holds up quite well on its own, and gets increasingly better with each episode. If you wrote off the show after the first few episodes, the current season seems to be going really well, except that I am really sick of [spoiler alert!] seeing Cooper and Charlotte having sex [end spoiler alert].

The Audio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)--Enhanced for 16x9 Television. Nothing special here. The picture quality is fine.

The Video:
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. The audio is clear.

The Extras:
Two extended episodes:
1. "In Which We Meet Addison, A Nice Girl from Somewhere Else"
2. "In Which Addison Finds The Magic"
In both episodes, the extra scene(s) did not stand out to me. I did see both episodes when they originally aired, and still nothing. The episodes themselves are fine, but whatever was added on did not make much of a difference.

"Kate Walsh: Practice Makes Perfect"
A bunch of people talk about Kate Walsh, (briefly) including Private Practice co-stars KaDee Strickland and Paul Adelstein, Sara Ramirez (Dr. Callie Torres on Grey's Anatomy), and Mike O'Malley, among others. A lot of the people interviewed aren't identified, but they include old friends, co-stars, family members, and directors. Walsh reads an excerpt from a play she wrote when she was ten years old. The segment covers various roles Walsh had from plays to an improv group to a role in The Drew Carey Show where she dons a fat suit. Basically it's a giant Kate Walsh lovefest. If you're a huge Kate Walsh fan, it's worth watching, otherwise it's skippable.

"Alternative Ensemble: Behind the Scenes of Private Practice"
The entire cast of Private Practice and the producers all talk about how great the show is and how great it is to work with each other.

Deleted Scenes
Like the extended episodes, the deleted scenes are okay, but nothing spectacular. There is a reason most of the deleted scenes were excluded from the episodes. There is one scene from "In Which Sam Receives an Unexpected Visitor" that could have been interesting in regards to the [spoiler alert] Naomi-Sam-Dell love triangle [end spoiler alert]. A deleted scene from "In Which Dell Finds His Fight" between Dell's grandfather and his friend was also worth keeping for the sake of continuity.

Bloopers
I'm not sure some of the bloopers can be considered "bloopers." There's a lot of just goofing off in front of the camera (which is sometimes funny), but I consider bloopers to be like flubbed lines or random prat falls or something similar.

Audio Commentary
There's audio commentary for the episode "In Which Dell Finds His Fight" with Taye Diggs and Chris Lowell. Lowell actually thanks anyone who took the effort to watch the episode with the audio commentary on. They like KaDee Strickland an awful lot. Chris Lowell calls himself Zach Efron's stand in, which is amusing. Taye Diggs and Chris Lowell are actually pretty funny guys with decent banter, including commentary on Taye Diggs' acting with coffee and a thermal mug, muscles, what's it like to work with Taye Diggs, and how Chris Lowell has a roommate who wants to "gnaw" on Tim Daly. Actually, there are a few jokes about Tim Daly and how he doesn't seem to age. For an audio commentary, it's actually pretty entertaining. I know, I'm a little surprised too, considering the episodes plot includes geriatric fight club and a couple struggling to conceive.

The 411: Private Practice is a pretty good show, to say the least. It has a good balance of drama and funny moments. Is this DVD set worth buying? Maybe not. The extras aren't anything special, the extended episodes didn't have anything that caught my eye beyond what originally aired, and probably the best bonus feature is surprisingly the audio commentary since it's laid back and pokes fun at everyone and everything. And really, who buys DVDs to listen to the audio commentary? If you already liked the show, it is fun to watch the episodes and think, "Oh yeah, I forgot that happened," because it felt like a long time between season one and the new episodes on now.

Final Score:  6.5   [ Average ]