Girlfriends: The Complete First Season

Conspiracy theorists might wonder why earlier seasons of lily-white snoozers from the CW network such as Smallville, One Tree Hill and even Reba (!) have been available on DVD for years while Girlfriends, one of the smartest recent series about race and class, is only now reaching stores, nearly six and a half years after its debut. Loosely following the Sex and the City template, Girlfriends revolves around Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross), an L.A. alpha-gal lawyer; her no-nonsense assistant (Golden Brooks); and Joan’s two pals from college, a gold-digging real-estate agent (Jill Marie Jones) and a freeloading libertine (Persia White). Man trouble is a frequent theme, as with most estrogen-heavy sitcoms, but silliness is mitigated significantly by having an actual dude—Joan’s colleague William (Reggie B. Hayes)—as a main character. Some narrative tics grate (such as Joan’s thought balloons) and were later dropped; the odd misstep aside, one has to love a show clever enough to use the Tuskegee experiment as a punch line.—Melissa Anderson