Six of the best from the box

With television going into what it calls summer programming - re-runs and rubbish mostly - these are some television shows now on DVD that you might want to watch again:

Miami Vice, The First Season

Producer/director Michael Mann went on to big-screen events like Heat and Ali, but he honed his chops in this stylish series with great soundtracks (Prince, Latin-soul, the Stones), snappy wisecracking scripts, the occasional big star (Bruce Willis, Glenn Frey of the Eagles) and villains you could spot across a crowded dance floor. It's all guns, girls, cocaine and speedboats - and no earth tones in this world of pastels, Art Deco and Don Johnson's T-shirt with a suit look. Pure escapism, but white suits, shoulder pads, jazzercise and smoking seldom looked better. And there's Jan Hammer's terrific score in the opening montage.

The Sopranos, The Compete Fifth Season

From the opening scenes of the wintry garden at Carmela's house after Tony has moved out, this was the series where it all just got worse as Tony's life, former friendships, and old loyalties unravel. This was always going to be a dark ride but you can feel the noose tightening when they start killing their own - the doomed Adriana, where actress Drea de Matteo ages and self-destructs before your eyes - and the clan is forced to make alliances with old foes. There is not a lot of the eerie allure of former series this time round, but it is compelling viewing, especially as the lives of Adriana and new character Tony B (Steve Buscemi) come to their inevitable and awful conclusions.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Fourth Season

Given the popularity of Seinfeld you would have thought a similarly funny but dry series by, and starring, its droll creator Larry David would have pulled a big viewing audience. It didn't, largely because David and his fellow players are so annoying, emotionally volatile and mildly dysfunctional. Which is the appeal of this clever, often improvised, series in which small incidents loop back and become major catastrophes. This final series' running thread has Larry invited to appear in Mel Brooks' The Producers on Broadway. The final episode is obvious and falls flat but the journey there is typically hilarious. If Curb went past you, start at the beginning, but longtime fans will need no convincing that this is among the year's best tele-series to end up on DVD.

Deadwood, The Complete First Season

Foul-mouthed and violent they may be, but the characters who inhabit Deadwood are gripping in their awfulness, and their shifting moral codes. Ian McShane - in a career-reinventing role as Machiavellian saloon owner Al Swearengen - is one of the most evil, complex and frightening characters to appear in a television series since ... well, since whenever. With real characters (Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane) stalking the streets alongside fictional gamblers, losers, vigilantes, drunks, miners, call girls and rogue traders, the scene is set for a grim meditation on morality, and maybe even order emerging from the otherwise chaotic life of this frontier town in the late-19th century, when America was slowly trying to define itself. Shot in sepia tones and similar in feel to Robert Altman's classic film McCabe and Mrs Miller, it is the most innovative - and perhaps demanding - series on the small screen.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Complete Series

Glitzy 80s kitsch doesn't come any better than this. It might be set way out in the future but there are disco balls, big hair, women dressed like they've stepped out of Olivia Newton John's Physical video, and villains with names like Draco and Pantera. It is hilariously addictive, with a guest cast of has-beens (Buster Crabbe, Gary Coleman), soon-to-be-stars (Jamie Lee Curtis) and those like Jack Palance, who clearly saw the joke and hammed it up like crazy. You could watch for the camp clothes or the continuity errors or for foxy Pamela Hensley as the pouting, underdressed, over-acting Princess Ardala. Rubbish of course, but so howlingly funny that it is utterly engrossing - and its futuristic disco bars are wonderfully retro-chic. The revival starts here.

Carnivale, The Complete First Season

Life on the margins of society (like Deadwood and The Sopranos) provides the best context for drama, and for Carnivale the writers went as far to the edge as they could: a travelling show of carnies, outcasts and misfits travelling through America's Dustbowl in the Depression. Part John Steinbeck and part Todd Browning's Freaks, with a good measure of apocalyptic conflict between Good and Evil thrown in to make it as metaphorical as it is mesmerising. Carnivale isn't an easy one to watch but its parade of oddball characters (a comatose woman, co-joined twins, snake charmer and strongman) and the metaphysical subtexts make it the kind of series you watch repeatedly and find new nuance and dark humour every time. As with The Sopranos and Deadwood, it comes from HBO, which is increasingly becoming a quality seal.