JAG

I bought the complete first season of JAG on DVD when I was last in the US. Yesterday I found the time to watch the pilot and the first two episodes, and I enjoyed it. The opening scene in "Shadow" where Harmon Rabb, the hero, finds himself jogging in the park in Washington and meets a jogging Bill Clinton by chance, and then a helicopter lands to pick up, to the surprise of the secret service guys, not the president but Harm, is hilarious. The stories combine criminal investigation with showing off the best of America's military hardware, and are believable enough. I'll watch some more episodes before deciding whether I should pick up the second season as well, but up to now I like it. I find JAG to be of similar quality as the much younger spin-off NCIS, although of course JAG doesn't have any character even half as colorful as Abby from NCIS.

The one thing that annoys me though is that for some reason the JAG DVDs won't play on my laptop. The laptop plays all other DVDs, even those from the US with regional coding, due to a DVD Regionkiller program. And the DVD does play on my desktop computer, as well as on my DVD player. But neither of the 6 discs of the set will play on the laptop, not with PowerDVD, nor with the Windows Media Player. I wonder if that is due to some special copy protection scheme, or whether that particular DVD drive is for some reason unable to run these discs. For me it is just annoying that I can't watch JAG in a mobile way, but what about people that don't have several DVD players at home and can't watch the DVD on the only player they own? You would think that DVDs are standardized enough to play on every player, but that obviously isn't the case.