Prisoner Cell Block H, Set 1 (25th Anniversary Collector's Edition) - Region 1 DVD

Curious newcomers, too, will find much to discover in the 25th Anniversary Collector's Edition. Prisoner concerns the lives and dramas of sundry inmates, guards, and prison officials at Wentworth. The earliest episode here, from season 3, serves as a useful introduction to the program's cast and tone. The story entails a prison break gone horribly wrong for several women trapped inside a sewer; meanwhile, authorities jostle over control of Wentworth and fend off rising dissatisfaction from the guards' union over working conditions. The episode makes clear that Prisoner is about varieties of power among and between authorities and incarcerated women, about small acts of kindness, sadness, frustration, and unbearable displays of ego and corruption. Those themes extend to the other, scattered episodes in this box set, all of which involve Prisoner's most colorful and memorable character (introduced in season 4), a sadistic, lesbian guard named Joan "the Freak" Ferguson (Maggie Kirkpatrick). As the years go by, Joan appears to have a brutal, conniving, thieving hand in everything, encountering resistance only from the strongest of the inmates, and surviving assaults, terrorist attacks, and much else until receiving her comeuppance in the series finale. If this collection, which quickly grows on a viewer, is a fair representation of the legacy of Prisoner: Cell Block H, one can only hope to see more in the future. --Tom Keogh