Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18645 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-07-18
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, Russian
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 12
• Running time: 1440 minutes

Customer Reviews

Revisiting Carnivale
I had forgotten just how amazing this HBO offering was ... enjoying it more than I can say the second time around.

Anybody else feel a bit ...disappointed?
I got sucked into this series, despite the facile writing, the often cringe-worthy dialogue and the painfully obvious fact that many -- thank god not all -- of the castmembers couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag (or they were directed and edited so badly that they were unable to show any talent). Through it all, I gave the writers credit that something more was going on below the veneer of arbitrary spookiness and inscrutability. The ending told me that I had been a sucker.
Give a high school drama club a $50 million budget for costumes, sets and cgi, tell them to do something spooky and atmospheric, and you'd get something like this. Oh, and throw in a few really talented actors to highlight how bad everyone else is.
The only dialogue I ever want to hear coming out of these writers again is, "You want fries with that?"

Sorry for the vitriole, but I just finished watching this series last night, and I wish I hadn't.

Carnivale: Brilliant. Packaging: Blech.
The only reason I withheld one star is the packaging. Why on earth did they break this up with 2 eps per disc? It's unwieldy when folded out. They managed to put 3 and sometimes 4 episodes of Six Feet Under onto one disc, along with some commentaries; could they not have done this with Carnivale, making it an easily managed 4 discs per season package?

The one I received had a dinged, smushed corner, and the dinged package contained a loose disc because part of the plastic disc-holding hub had broken off. This happens with way too many box sets I buy. I would rather have DVD holders made from resilient, functional plastic instead of the clear yet brittle, easy-to-break stuff. It just doesn't hold or release DVDs well, and I honestly don't care about the art behind the discs when I'm trying to pry one off its hub.

Perhaps when I go dig into this richly mysterious story again, I'll be in a less gripey mood. Except of course I'll eventually have to re-confront HBO's colossally dingbat decision to cancel this series. It was exquisite torture watching this week by week; it kept me baffled for the longest time, yet I kept watching. Something about the combination of gritty, dusty period realism and arcane myth makes this a show unlike any other I can recall.