Due to poor sales of the Sony Pictures DVD's of the seasons one, two, and three, there may not be a release date for any of the seasons four, five and six DVD's of Party of Five... ever.
However, there is away around that. The entire series is available for viewing on Amazon.com Video on Demand, and if you have a yearly membership to Amazon Prime you can watch all 143 episodes from seasons 1 to 6 on your laptop, desktop, or TV set hooked up with any type Roku player for free with the Prime membership. It cost me around $79 for the year, plus taxes and Amazon fees (totaling just over $83), but I feel it was worth it for I can view several of my favorite movies and TV shows (including the entire NYPD Blue series) on Amazon Video on Demand.
True, that it does not mean owning any DVD's, but at least with the Amazon Prime, I now can watch every episode of Party of Five when I feel like it. Check it out and the membership benefits at Amazon.com if you have money to spare.
Sony really puts its customers in a no win situation. I have no desire to wait another 5 years for the next season and another 5 years for the last season. Or not get them at all.
On the other hand, if we don't buy season 4, then the can claim poor sales was the reason.
But we now know that's really a load of crap. There is no more of less desire for season 4 now than there was 5 years ago. If anything, I suppose the studio might think as more time passed by, people would forget more.
If they would just come out and announce that they planned on releasing seasons 5 and 6, I think THEN they would actually see a spike in sales that would make Sony make a nicer profit than doing it this way.
No way emails got this released. No way sales was an issue or else why would they bother releasing this now? If the sales sucked before, they didn't sell a boatload of units in the last few years that made them rethink things.
There is really no good explanation other than this being totally random and that makes me way too nervous to invest in these shows again. Too bad, because DVD doesn't appeal to me much anymore, but I'd buy this show in a heartbeat if I knew they would release the entire series in the next 12-18 months.
I do not want to own a show that doesn't allow me to watch the entire run from beginning to end. And I sold off seasons 1-3, because I assumed PO5 was dead on dvd unless Shout Factory got the rights.
Ugh, I wish they would have just kept going and I had all 6 seasons of my shelves right now. Stupid Sony.
You can stream every single episode right here at Amazon, ALL six seasons. The first couple of seasons has gone in and out of print, so it becomes a gamble. In the long run you can still buy seasons one through four on ebay, and that will be guaranteed pretty much forever.
It goes to show how dead this IMDB board is. It's great that season five made it to print so quickly, even if it's only a "Manufacture on Demand" DVD-R format box. DVD-R burned discs run the chance of early death when compared to standard manufactured silver disc technology. This may not really be a factor for most fans, me included. We finally get the opportunity to have season four and five sourced from the network originals (though I'm sure some of the music soundtrack content has been removed due to copyright problems), instead of black market crap sourced from homemade crude second/third/fourth generation traded videotaped non-originals.
FYI to everyone desperate to see (or re-watch) seasons 4-6: If you have Comcast/Xfinity, they have the ENTIRE series available if you subscribe to Streampix. The cost is only $4.99/mo, so you can just cancel once you're done watching all seasons... if that only takes you a month, it's a lot cheaper than streaming each episode through IMDb or Amazon! Heck, it's also cheaper than buying 6 seasons of DVDs. I finally caved in and subscribed, so I'm working my way through season 4 right now (since I already watched 1-3 on DVD).
This was one of my favorite shows when it originally aired, so I'm definitely enjoying re-living the experience. Although I must admit, the cast was much guiltier of over-acting than I realized! Guess back when I was watching as a teenager, they just seemed like normal emotions to me - LOL. I think the worst are Claudia, Julia, and Griffin, who can't finish ONE sentence without a dramatic "woe is me" or "are you serious?" pause.
Oh boy, low resolution, stuttering playback, and a whole five minutes at a time. Fun times.
Free doesn't mean enjoyable. You can also fork over some dough and watch all six seasons right here at Amazon streaming in much better quality. There's no struggle, just a matter of your priorities.