Stretching from the Stone Age to the year 2000, Simon Schama's Complete History of Britain does not pretend to be a definitive chronicle of the turbulent events which buffeted and shaped the British Isles. What Schama does do, however, is tell the story in vivid and gripping narrative terms, free of the fustiness of traditional academe, personalising key historical events by examining the major characters at the centre of them. Not all historians would approve of the history depicted here as shaped principally by the actions of great men and women rather than by more abstract developments, but Schama's way of telling it is a good deal more enthralling as a result.

Schama successfully gives lie to the idea that the history of Britain has been moderate and temperate, passing down the generations as stately as a galleon, taking on board sensible ideas but steering clear of sillier, revolutionary ones. Nonsense. Schama retells British history the way it was--as bloody, convulsive, precarious, hot-blooded and several times within an inch of haring off onto an entirely different course. Schama seems almost to delight in the goriness of history. Themes returned to repeatedly include the wars between the Scots and the Irish and the Catholic/Protestant conflicts--only the Irish question remains unresolved by the new millennium. As Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy, Schama talks less of Kings and Queens but of poets and idea-makers like Orwell. Still, with his pungent, direct manner and against an evocative visual and aural backdrop, Schama makes history seem as though it happened yesterday, the bloodstains not yet dry.

On the DVD: The Complete History of Britain extras are generously packaged on a separate disc and include the original score and a Simon Schama biography. There's an interesting "promotional message" to camera in which Schama explains the role of a cab driver, Wally, in inspiring the series, along with an interview with Mark Lawson in which Schama stresses the deliberate subjectivity of these programmes and an inaugural BBC History lecture in which he defends TV's ability to transpose history to camera. --David Stubbs

Based on a play written by Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard, Simpatico delves into the community of Kentucky horse breeders and the secret that threatens to unravel their lives.

The hook of The Simple Life is irresistible: two wealthy, pampered young women go from upper-crust Los Angeles to an Arkansas farm to prove that they can survive without their mobile phones and credit cards. As hotel heiress Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie (daughter of pop star Lionel) blithely move in with a farm family, the Ledings, the culture clash immediately becomes a train wreck; when asked to pluck chickens, Richie declares, "I'm not plucking anything but my eyebrows." They try to work a series of jobs (at a dairy farm, a fast-food joint and a livestock auction), but they possess not a jot of work ethic, nor any sense of the consequences of failure. Like the girls themselves, this 2003 reality show becomes fascinating and repellent, comic and horrifying. It's like watching alien beings trying to masquerade as people. --Bret Fetzer