If there’s one thing I learned about FOX’s Lie To Me when I started writing about it, with its third and ultimately final season, it’s that the Tim Roth-led show has some incredibly passionate fans. Of all the cancellations FOX wreaked over this past offseason, the Lie To Me fans were among the most upset. I sort of have to feel for them: not only did their show get axed, but its last DVD release leaves a lot to be desired.
Season three had its highs and lows. I missed the always-good Mekhi Phifer, who was written out of the show after the second year. Yet I was very happy to see Monique Curnen (the best thing about The Unusuals not named Jeremy Renner) turn up in a meaty recurring role, plus the likes of Michael B. Jordan (Friday Night Lights), Annabeth Gish (Brotherhood) and Ashton Holmes (Nikita). As a TV buff, it’s always a delight to see old faces in new places.
And there were some good episodes in the mix, like “Veronica,” which boasted Smallville‘s Annette O’Toole as the title character and showed us Roth’s Dr. Cal Lightman from a new perspective.
Unfortunately, Lie To Me was all too often a double-edged sword. Roth was fantastic in the lead role as the eccentric, sometimes abrasive Cal, and he had a really great bond with his daughter Emily (Hayley McFarland) that was different from most parent-child relationships on TV.
Yet at times I wished there was less of Cal and more of his supporting cast, namely the always-dependable Kelli Williams as his partner, Dr. Gillian Foster. Season three dropped a big bombshell that might have gone a long way toward helping balance out the show a bit more … but we’ll never know.
Regardless of my thoughts on the show itself, though, I wish that its final DVD outing would have been a bit more significant. The only bonus features for Lie To Me: The Complete Third and Final Season are deleted scenes and a FOX Movie Channel character featurette with Tim Roth.
There’s no gag reel like there was for season two, and not even the “making-of” that we normally see on most TV on DVD sets. Now, I’ll cut the studio some slack and say that they might not have known LTM was on the way out when they started making bonus features for this set, but even so, couldn’t they have rounded up some people for commentaries? Or interviews? Even if this wasn’t a final-season set, it’d still be light in the extras department.
When it comes to the specs, you’re in fine hands if you happen to speak French. There’s good audio and subtitles for English speakers, but as far as foreign languages go, French gets the only audio track. Spanish speakers will be limited to subtitles. At least the widescreen presentation is pretty good, doing justice to those really cool Lightman Group sets that the camera loves.
Lie To Me fans will obviously want to own the final season of their favorite series, and they won’t necessarily be disappointed. The episodes are all there and they do look great. I just wish that they would have gotten a little more back in return.
Disclaimer: This review is based on a complimentary copy, provided to CliqueClack, solely for the purpose of this review.
Clacked by Brittany Frederick 
on Oct 21, 2011 @ 11:00 EST5EDT
