DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Heimat: eine deutsche Chronik, directed by Edgar Reitz (Facets Video, 2005) Peter Gunn, directed by Blake Edwards and others (Sets 1 and 2, A&E Home Video, 2002 [out of print but widely available; selections also available on Netflix]) Secret Agent a.k.a. Danger Man: The Complete Collection, created by Ralph Smart (A & E Home Video, 2010) The Politician’s Wife, directed by Graham Theakston (Acorn Media, 2004) Faith, directed by John Strickland (Koch Vision, 2005) House of Cards Trilogy: House of Cards, To Play the King, The Final Cut, directed by Paul Seed and Mike Vardy (BBC Warner, 2003) State of Play, directed by David Yates (BBC Warner, 2008) Some years ago an English literary agent, talking with a friend about the sorry state of broadcast television, finished by saying “What do you expect, darling? After all, small screens, small minds . . .” Our television sets have greatly improved since then, but smallmindedness, even in HD and on an oversize flat screen, is still smallmindedness, and alas all too visible in the reality shows and formulaic dramas which dominate contemporary airwaves. On few channels—not even cable channels, much of the time—is true artistic ambitiousness on offer, work by auteurs expressing their ideas with adequate funding and (even rarer) a considered sense of the medium and what it can do. In this Chronicle I will single out some exceptions to the rule, television works from the past (including the quite recent past) which are available on DVD or via other modes, and which are capable of reminding us all of what television can accomplish—and thus of furnishing a riposte to that cynical literary agent. One way to escape smallness of outlook is via duration, that is, via the long-form television drama, which develops its characters and complicates its plots over the course of multiple episodes, each leading to the next, each thematically and visually linked with the whole evolving enterprise. Evolving, but eventually concluded; long-form miniseries have a shaped dramatic structure, a beginning, middle, and end, as opposed to the endlessly ramifying shapelessness of sitcoms or other conventional television fare. The 1970s and 1980s were a rich period, in northern Europe especially, for long-form dramas. In England, there were Dennis Potter’s lip-synched musical extravaganzas Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, and political thrillers by Alan Plater (A Very British Coup) and Troy Kennedy-Martin (Edge of Darkness); in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander, the latter, in its televised [End Page 109] version, almost twice as long as the film released in theaters. In Germany, the major figure was Edgar Reitz, the director and co-writer of the extraordinary eleven-episode-long Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik (1984). “Heimat” means “homeland,” the place to which you owe something and which owes something to you. Reitz is no Blut-und-Boden nationalist. In spite of the word deutsche in the subtitle, his film is resolutely ungeneralizing and unideological, and less the chronicle of Germany than of one small German place, Schabbach, which Reitz invented from memories of his childhood in the Hunsrück, an upland district of the western Rhineland with its own dialect and stubbornly preserved provincial ways. It rains a lot there and it is too cold to grow wine grapes, as one character observes early on. Another character, the jabbermouth madam of a Berlin brothel who recklessly accepts a marriage proposal and with it residence in the Hunsrück, calls out peevishly that “nothing ever happens” there. What Reitz’s drama does is prove her wrong, or perhaps explore the ways in which she is both right and wrong. Over the course of time (the series begins just after World War I and concludes in 1982), everything happens in Schabbach, but in an unmelodramatic way. The son of one prominent local family, Paul Simon, marries the daughter of another, Maria Wiegand. They have two sons. Paul abruptly disappears, then reappears years later as the prosperous owner of a factory in Detroit. Maria has a much-loved child out of wedlock, the son of a highway engineer. Meanwhile her brother, a...