TV/International

The sleepy English village of Dibley gets shaken up when their new vicar turns out to be a woman--and not just any woman, but Geraldine Granger, played by Dawn French of the peerless comedy duo French & Saunders. With wit and warmth, Gerry swiftly trumped her parishioner's chauvinism and turned British sitcom The Vicar of Dibley into a cult favorite. Over the course of 16 episodes and specials, Gerry grappled with everything from a broken church window to getting smeared in the tabloids, from the demise of the Easter Bunny to the possible destruction of the village.

In this award-winning British sitcom, bumbling single father Tim Elliott (Darren Boyd – ReGenesis, Holy Flying Circus) is embroiled in a tricky child custody battle with his acidic ex-wife Judith. Desperately trying to win the respect of his unimpressed, horribly precocious, 9-year-old son Marcus, Tim decides to quit his dead-end computer store job and look for something awe-inspiring. In applying for a civil service position, Tim is accidentally recruited as a trainee spy for MI5 – and now he has the coolest job in the world – but he cannot tell a soul.

Bean, Bean, maniacal nut / The more you watch, you bust a gut! First unleashed in 1989, this sketch series was embraced by PBS viewers in the United States. In the tradition of the great silent clowns, Rowan Atkinson created a character with universal and multi-generational appeal (the sketches have little dialogue and are driven by often ingenious physical comedy). Like Bart Simpson, the resourceful, mischievous, and sometimes malevolent Bean is the inner child incarnate who acts on the impulses polite society normally represses.

They wore napkins on their heads, put things on top of other things, and made the Spanish Inquisition hip. They came from a small island off the coast of Europe and took the world by storm. They set a standard for dementia that will never be matched. They were Monty Python. Now, every single moment of the legendary Flying Circus is together in this comprehensive DVD set.

Tireless social climber Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "Bouquet," of course) returns with more hilarious high-class hi-jinks. The set, 'Hyacinth in Full Bloom', includes 4 discs sold individually: 'My Way or the Hyacinth Way', 'Hints from Hyacinth', 'Home Is Where the Hyacinth Is', and the Holiday disc, 'Deck the Halls with Hyacinth'. The set includes the complete first and second seasons as well as all of the Hoilday specials.

American sitcoms usually have a bland, likable central character who has to cope with obnoxious acquaintances--who usually provide most of the actual comedy. The British smartly put the comic personalities front and center, and Keeping Up Appearances has one of the best: The petty, pretentious, tyrannical Hyacinth Bucket (played by the impressive Patricia Routledge), a dowdy middle-class social climber with a piercing voice and an unshakable faith in herself.

Here are the final seven episodes of the 1970s British comedy series, Good Neighbors (entitled The Good Life in England), a show that brilliantly captures the Zeitgeist of the '70s. The Goods, who quit the rat race for a life of subsistence farming, are next-door neighbors to the Ledbetters, some of the fastest rat-race runners around. At first, Margot and Jerry Ledbetter are horrified to see Tom and Barbara Good turn their tiny yard into a series of animal pens and vegetable gardens.

Originally telecast in the 1970s, Good Neighbors is the wonderful 1970s Britcom about an upper-middle-class couple who relinquish consumerism and turn their cozy suburban London home into a self-sufficient farm. Tom (Richard Briers) and Barbara (Felicity Kendal) Good trade in one version of the good life for an impoverished other--an old tractor instead of a car, a goat instead of a purebred pup--to the continuing consternation of their best friends and executive-salaried neighbors, Jerry (Paul Eddington) and Margot (Penelope Keith) Ledbetter.

Basil Fawlty, as created and performed by John Cleese, is the rudest, most boorish, most hilariously obnoxious man on the face of the planet. What a natural for a TV sitcom!

Father Ted is one of those rare sitcoms that defies categorization--it owes as much to Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett as it does to Monty Python--and its blend of satire, character comedy, and anarchic surrealism has made it a cult favorite around the world. Exiled to remote Craggy Island, Father Ted Crilley shares a house with the breathtakingly stupid Father Dougal and the constantly inebriated Father Jack, who has a small vocabulary and a taste for furniture polish. Their housekeeper, Mrs.