Question: I've been watching ...

Question: I've been watching the miniseries Band of Brothers on HBO, and I was wondering if there was any information about availability dates for DVD or video. Hats off to Tom Hanks. The series is great! — DCA, Seal Beach, Calif.

Televisionary: My friends at HBO Video don't have an exact release date, but they tell me Band of Brothers will probably be out on VHS and DVD sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, DCA, so keep the credit card in the wallet until October or so.

And I'm with you on Hank's track record for HBO. Band of Brothers, with its excellent writing and acting and its attention to detail, is right up there among the best of the best war movies. Between that and Hanks's From the Earth to the Moon, his name is on two of the finest miniseries to ever grace the small screen, in my opinion.

You present me with the opportunity to launch a mini-slam, by the way. The broadcast networks claim that HBO is able to woo critics and audiences with its freedom to use foul language and nudity (at least, that's what they say about The Sopranos), but those two projects boasted very little of either. The Corner, another excellent HBO miniseries, featured healthy doses of cussing, but even without that it blew away any comparable network effort. The networks could still crank out quality miniseries, as they used to do in the format's heyday, but they, for the most part, have forgotten how to take such risks.