New DVDs - "Midsomer Murders," "George Gently" - NYTimes.com George Gently, Series 4 In the leafy but surprisingly dangerous precincts of Midsomer County, England, where corpses turn up under every hedgerow and inside every church, the evening of Feb. 2, 2011, was particularly deadly. It was then that one of British television's most popular characters said goodbye, leaving the series "Midsomer Murders" after 13 seasons, 81 feature-length episodes and around 220 murders, as well as assorted suicides and accidental and unexplained deaths. He wasn't killed off, of course. The pact a show like "Midsomer" has with its viewers allows for the brutal disposal of straying spouses, guilty vicars, greedy businessmen and dotty pensioners but not of anyone we care about. The retiring Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby of the Causton Police Department was last seen in the pink of health, his supercilious smirk firmly in place, heading into an indefinite future with his equally beloved wife, Joyce. Life has gone on in Little Worthy, Newton Magna, Midsomer Parva and the show's many other fictional villages. A new detective - the old detective's cousin, also named Barnaby - has solved 10 more cases, and the ratings have remained strong, at about six million viewers for each two-hour episode. But the slow pace of trans-Atlantic DVD distribution means that America is just now receiving Tom Barnaby's swan song, in a set containing the final four episodes of the show's 13th season along with a "Saying Goodbye to Barnaby" essay and photo gallery. At 91 episodes and counting, "Midsomer Murders" is one of the longest-running crime dramas on British TV, about to pass "Waking the Dead" (92) and well ahead of shows like "Agatha Christie's Poirot" (65), "Rumpole of the Bailey" (44) and "Morse" (33) that are better known in America. Its endurance may have something to do with being as much comedy as drama, repeating the formulas of "Marple" and "Murder, She Wrote" but dialing up the satire. The rural gentry and village hoi polloi of "Midsomer" are reliably smug, venal and pretentious, and a fair share of the murders seem largely justified, if still regrettable. The central joke of the show has been that Tom Barnaby, unlike the gracious and brainy Jane Marple or Jessica Fletcher, is openly contemptuous of the rotters and bunglers he's forced to deal with, even though he spends a good part of his time bungling himself before inspiration strikes. As played by the veteran British actor John Nettles (who was 66 when he stepped away from the show), he's a decent, impatient guy with a pretty high opinion of himself who starts most episodes in a happy frame of mind and then slowly builds toward a high pitch of irritation. The episodes of Set 20 are, of course, comforting in their adherence to the show's and genre's formulas, with a large cast of possible suspects introduced within minutes (at a party, a piano recital, a country spa) and the identity of the killer or killers revealed at the last possible moment. "Master Class" is notable for not murdering anyone until the 59th minute, although there's an earlier suicide to whet our appetites. Barnaby is sarcastic and grumpy and lectures people about their own business; it's a nice touch that in his final episode, "Fit for Murder," Joyce takes him to that rural spa to de-stress. That last episode contains a story line about growing old, and Barnaby's relationship to his father, that's a bit heavy-handed, but the actual farewell is understated: a small birthday party, at which the show's regulars (another three of whom also departed) gather along with the new chief inspector, John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon). The phone rings with news of unpleasantness in a nearby village, which fans will recognize as a homage to the series's first episode. And life goes on. Also out on Tuesday, for fans of British mysteries, is the fourth series (two episodes) of the BBC period police drama "George Gently," set in the 1960s. It's now known as "Inspector George Gently" in Britain. Martin Shaw plays Gently, a middle-aged detective who has retreated to the eastern England coast from London after the murder of his wife; Lee Ingleby plays his sergeant and surrogate son, a local lad whose professional and personal ethics are not always up to Gently's standards. Acorn Media, "Midsomer Murders, Set 20" Blu-ray $59.99, DVD $49.99; "George Gently, Series 4" Blu-ray and DVD $39.99, not rated The Devil's Needle and Other Tales of Vice and Redemption The films in this set of silents, from the Library of Congress's collection, carry provocative titles like "The Inside of the White Slave Traffic" (1913) and "Children of Eve" (1915) and are of interest for their portrayals of drug use and prostitution, which are simultaneously surprisingly honest and humorously oblique. But the primary value here is the opportunity to see an early performance by the silent-era superstar Norma Talmadge in "The Devil's Needle" (1916), written by Chester Withey and Roy Somerville and directed by Withey. Talmadge plays an artist's model with "a habit contracted in times of stress in order to "carry on" and never completely broken." She meets her dealer, identified as a "drug vendor," and then retreats between poses to her dressing table, where she pulls out her spoon and syringe and gets to work. We don't see her actually shooting up. Before long she's given the painter a little taste - it's "inspiration ready-made" - and the rest of the film follows their divergent paths as she gets clean, and he becomes a bug-eyed addict. "The Devil's Needle" is certainly preachy, but unlike so many later addiction melodramas it doesn't feel the need to sacrifice its characters - there are happy endings to be had for everyone but the drug merchants. It also has quite a bit of sly humor, as in the scene when the model turns art critic and deems the painter's morphine-aided work "artificial and uninspired." And Talmadge, in her second year as a feature-film star, is a delight, appealingly spunky and tender. One caution: The print, from a 1923 rerelease, had significantly deteriorated in some places, and one late scene in particular is almost illegible. Kino Lorber, Blu-ray $39.95, DVD $34.95, not rated BARBARELLA Roger Vadim's psychedelic, shag-carpeted 1968 science-fiction adventure, best known for Jane Fonda's zero-gravity strip tease under the opening credits, gets a Blu-ray release. With John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg and Marcel Marceau. The film "rapidly becomes a special kind of mess," Renata Adler wrote in The New York Times in 1968. Paramount, Blu-ray $29.99, PG Giulio Questi's 1967 spaghetti western includes a gang of gay cowboys chasing a cargo of stolen gold. With Tomas Milian. The movie "displayed a surreal aesthetic worthy of Buñuel," the filmmaker Alex Cox wrote in an essay about spaghetti westerns in The Times last month. Blue Underground, Blu-ray $29.98, not rated GOD BLESS AMERICA Disgust with reality television sets a man off on a murderous rampage in Bobcat Goldthwait's violent satire. With Joel Murray and Tara Lynn Barr. Referring to the central character, Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in May, "Like it or not, his unhinged fury strikes a chord." Magnolia, Blu-ray $29.98, DVD $26.98, R MADAME BOVARY Frances O'Connor and Hugh Bonneville ("Downton Abbey") star in this BBC television movie from 2000. Tim Fywell directed. It's a "sharply drawn adaptation" of the Flaubert novel, Walter Goodman wrote in The Times in 2000, capturing "the predicament of the young wife, scornful of the affection of a devoted husband, who demands more of her handsome lovers than they prove able or willing to give." BBC Warner, DVD $29.98, not rated THE HUNTER Willem Dafoe plays a professional hunter sent to Tasmania to investigate reports that a tiger thought to be extinct has been sighted. With Sam Neill and Frances O'Connor; directed by Daniel Nettheim. The film "has the faintly surreal look peculiar to Australian movies in which nature pulses with a mysterious, primordial shimmer," Mr. Holden wrote in The Times in April.