Why Aren't Rich Man, Poor Man and Washington: Behind Closed Doors Available on DVD Yet?

It never fails to shock me that certain television shows are available on DVD-often in their entirety-while clearly superior shows are not. I've written before about the travails of trying to find certain classic episodic television shows-why is it that Hazel is available on DVD, for instance, but Thirtysomething is not-but now I turn my attention to the miniseries. Two miniseries in particular. Why is the entire North & South miniseries collection readily available on Netflix, I am compelled to ask, whereas neither Rich Man, Poor Man nor Washington: Behind Closed Doors have yet been released on a DVD format that American players can recognize?

If you read some histories of the miniseries genre in America they will mistakenly claim that Roots was the first long form miniseries produced directly for American television. The confusion, I suppose, stems from the fact that Roots was the first to mark the movement toward nightly serial broadcasts. But before that excellent examination of the history of slavery in America, there existed a long form miniseries that aired every Tuesday night over the course of a few months. Based-some might claim loosely-on Irwin Shaw's sprawling, multi-generation novel, Rich Man, Poor Man remains, in my opinion, the ultimate miniseries. The story of two brothers who took vastly different routes in their lives made stars out of Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss and, at least briefly, changed the medium of television. The rest of the cast featured many instantly recognizable faces of the time: Ed Asner, Susan Blakely, Ray Milland, Robert Reed, Bill Bixby, Kim Darby.