New generations can discover one of television’s groundbreaking sitcoms as the debut 1961 season of Car 54, Where Are You? arrives for the first time on DVD. Fred Gwynne (who’d go on to even bigger TV stardom as Herman Munster on The Munsters) and Joe E. Ross played a pair of New York City police partners constantly getting into laugh-out-loud situations at home, on the streets and in the squad room. Watch carefully in these 30 half-hour episodes and you’ll spot some familiar faces in the supporting cast—Gynne’s later Munster grandpa Al Lewis; Charlotte Rae, who’d find another level of stardom nearly a decade later in The Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes; Larry Storch of F Troop fame-to-be; and Nipsy Russell, who’d go on to become a poetry-spouting game-show mainstay in the 1970s. ($39.98)
