Two-a-Days—Hoover High: The Complete First Season

With movies about Southern high-school football teams as common as ticks on an ol' hound dog, it was inevitable that some enterprising network would eventually document the activities of one team's season for a reality-TV show. MTV rose to the challenge last year with this series following Alabama's Hoover High School Buccaneers. Just like the fictional folk in such films as Remember the Titans, the people in Hoover take football very seriously, and the youthful players are under tremendous pressure to win games and earn scholarships to colleges they otherwise could not afford to attend. This relentless stress results in exactly the kind of conflicts Hollywood screenwriters have been dreaming up for years—between coaches, teachers, parents, friends, and teammates. Practically every cliché you've ever seen in a movie about high-school sports can be found in the 10 first-season episodes of this show, which aired on MTV in 2006. Frankly, however, the life-imitates-art motif is somewhat self-defeating; in some ways, the series resembles Hollywood-spawned counterparts so closely that it might as well be a parody. DVD extras include roughly 90 minutes of mostly promotional featurettes that originally appeared online on the broadband video channel MTV Overdrive. Optional. (E. Hulse)