Overview: The weekly adventures of private detective Joe Mannix in Los Angeles. At his side is his faithful assistant Peggy Fair. Hard-boiled and gritty, Mannix dished out justice outside the law for his clients.

DVD Verdict: Once again a well made Region 1 DVD boxset of Mannix by CBS DVD. Shame though that for the second boxset running there were no episode intros by Mike Connors. They were a great addition to the first season set. Also absent from the second season DVD set which would have been nice, was an interview with Mike Connors about the change from the first season to the second, what with Joe Mannix having his own private detective agency. A tribute to Peggy Fisher would have been nice as well. Sadly all there was were the 25 second season episodes, although they had been digitally remastered well.

So the same has happened with the third season set - no extras again. I tested out all the episodes in on the six discs for this set, skipping a few chapters, and most episodes' prints have strong colours. There is grain but this can't be complained about really, because the episodes were aired 39-40 years ago on CBS.

It appears (from the CBS Television Syndication Bible website) that all 194 episodes of Mannix have been transferred to HD/digitally remastered, so really it's just a matter of how fast CBS DVD can produce the DVD boxsets for Seasons 4-8 (which covered 1970-75). Hopefully the fourth and fifth seasons come out on Region 1 in 2010.

The first and second seasons had seven discs each if I remember right. Yet this third season set had six discs (discs 1-5 having four episodes each on them, and disc 6 having five episodes on them). Seasons 4-8 have 24 episodes each, so I hope there will be six discs in each of the remaining five Region 1 DVD boxsets.

As for the show itself, well, there's seemingly less action and more humanitarian Mike. But the real problem is the amount of overacting that Mike Connors is doing. My wife actually started laughing. Laughing at Mannix you say? How is that possible? Well, it's possible!

On the good side, by the second episode of disk 2 things start getting back to normal and Mannix is on the case (no fee ever mentioned) for a rich widow who thinks her husband's been murdered. Underwater, yet. Great episode and lots of familiar character actor faces. The grey haired guy (whom you've seen in earlier episodes of Mannix) has a horrible accent in this. It comes and goes, but the rest is typical Mannix.[WC] This is a Full Screen Presentation (1.33:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.

Episode Promos on some of the episodes