Private Practice: The Complete First Season

With Grey’s Anatomy finding success year after year, it was only a matter of time before a resident of Seattle Grace ran off to another hospital to star in their very own spin-off. With Addison Montgomery’s (Kate Walsh) storyline running around in circles, suffering minimal progression and extremely unlikely flirtations — namely the one with Dr. Karev — it was an appropriate decision to take her out of the mix and give her a new environment to develop and explore new opportunities. To distinguish the Private Practice spin-off from Grey’s, the medical stakes have been decreased, centring the show on a laidback medical clinic with fewer patients with far less urgent medical needs, and the overall dynamic is more cheerful, with a fuller colour palette and a greater comic sensibility. The result is passable, familiar and harmless, while simultaneously limited in scope, vernacular and character complexity. There’s nothing particularly bad about the show but nothing really good either. Addison’s character has been surrounded with a parade of quirky medical professionals, including best friend Naomi (Audra McDonald), Naomi’s ex-husband, self-help guru Sam (Taye Diggs), alternative healer and requisite love interest Pete (Tim Daly), paediatrician and internet sex junkie Cooper (Paul Adelstein) and idiosyncratic psychiatrist Violet (Amy Brenneman). The most interesting character, however, is Charlotte King (KaDee Strickland), a type-A control freak who works at a nearby full-service hospital, struggles with insomnia and refuses to let anyone get close to her. The three-disc DVD set includes a "Behind the Scenes” featurette that sufficiently explores casting decisions, set designs and thematic interpretations, as well as a "Kate Walsh” featurette that is essentially a brief biography of her acting career. Commentaries are included on select episodes, with Kate Walsh and Shonda Rhimes cracking jokes about stage props and corpse molestation, in addition to the many jabs that Taye Diggs takes at Chris Lowell and Amy Brenneman’s persistent analysis of everything that Paul Adelstein says.