Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Animal Kingdom: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie Review

The Animals Get Restless

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 6, 2018

The Warner Archive Collection has become a savior of lost TV on Blu-ray. In case after case where Warner controls the rights, WAC has stepped up to continue Blu-ray presentations of popular TV shows relegated to DVD-only releases. If you're looking for the culprit behind these Blu-ray abandonments, it's always the same: brick-and-mortar retailers that won't devote their shrinking shelf space for physical media to more than a DVD version (if even that). WAC recognizes that there are still enough fans of TV on Blu-ray to make these releases profitable, if you deliver a good product and know how to market it.

So far, WAC has rescued The 100 (after one season), The Originals (after two seasons), The Leftovers (after two seasons) and Shameless (after seven seasons). It has also adopted shows that Warner's main TV division wouldn't even touch on Blu-ray. Fans of Longmire, Lucifer, iZombie, Riverdale and the short-lived Constantine, not to mention a lengthy list of DC animated series, all have WAC to thank for the availability of these shows on Blu-ray discs with images that consistently best their broadcast and streaming versions.

Now WAC has added another title to the list: TNT's Animal Kingdom, the addictively nasty crime drama freely adapted from writer/director David Michôd's 2010 Aussie thriller. After the series' successful 2016 debut, TNT gave showrunners John Wells and Jonathan Lisco an expanded order for thirteen new episodes (as compared to the first season's ten). Season Two aired on Tuesday nights beginning May 30, 2017 and concluding on August 29. Even before the second season could finish, TNT had ordered a third, which is expected later this year. But despite the series' established popularity, plus DVD sales good enough to sustain Season Two's release, TNT pulled the Blu-ray version after the first season.

Fans of Animal Kingdom should rejoice that the show has now shifted to WAC, which consistently produces superior Blu-rays, especially as compared to Warner's and TNT's TV division, where disc producers seem to be competing with each other to see who can achieve the lowest bitrates. As regular readers of Blu-ray.com's WAC reviews should know, WAC takes a different approach. As a result, while the first season of Animal Kingdom on Blu-ray was merely a serviceable reproduction, the second season arrives in high style with a superb image that leaves TNT's broadcasts in the dust.

Having already outlined the basic premise of Animal Kingdom in the Season One review, I will not repeat that history here. However, the events of Season One are freely discussed below, and newcomers to the series will encounter major spoilers if they proceed beyond this point.

As Season Two begins, the Cody family's criminal operations seem to be humming along with their usual bluff efficiency. Brothers Pope, Baz, Craig and Deran (Shawn Hatosy, Scott Speedman, Ben Robson and Jake Weary) are joined by their nephew, "J" (Finn Cole)—newly trusted after he foiled Season One's police sting—as they stage their latest heist. It's a typically brazen and kinetic Cody operation involving heavy machinery, a massive safe and three-wheeler ATVs as getaway vehicles. J proves his mettle when he has to improvise a diversion to cope with an unexpected interruption. Meanwhile, at home Boss Mama Smurf (Ellen Barkin) dishes out five portions of freshly baked apple pie as she awaits her brood's return. To all appearances, the Codys have emerged from the challenges of Season One as tough and strong as ever.

But there are deep fractures in the family unity, and as Season Two progresses, they begin to tear the Codys apart. Simmering conflicts erupt into the open, and grim secrets refuse to stay buried. After engineering the lucrative Camp Pendleton job in Season One, Baz chafes at Smurf's oversight and yearns to cut the iron matriarch's apron strings. His resolve is fortified by Smurf's descent into the bottle, presumably to drown memories of the murders for which she was responsible in Season One. Chief among them is the secret execution of Catherine or "Cath" (Daniella Alonso), the boys' childhood friend and the mother of Baz's daughter, Lena (Aamya Deva Keroles). Convinced that Cath was about to turn police informant, Smurf had her killed by Pope, who already felt betrayed when Cath chose Baz over him. Now Pope stews in a toxic brew of guilt, while Baz hires a private detective to locate the woman who's the closest thing to a wife he's ever likely to have. Meanwhile, a forlorn Lena wanders mournfully through the season, her child's face an open book of questions about why her mother has abandoned her and her father is never around. Uncle Pope becomes the kid's chief protector, partly from guilt and partly from the lingering suspicion that she may just be his daughter instead of Baz's.

Craig and Deran are also feeling the urge to separate from their manipulative mother, and neither wants to trade one boss for another by serving as Baz's underlings. Over the course of the season, each will attempt to strike out in his own direction, with varying results. Deran, always resentful as the baby of the family, manages to shed some of his insecurity by establishing himself in a (semi-)legitimate business—and also takes some decisive steps out of the closet in which he's been hiding as a gay man surrounded by alpha males. Meanwhile, Craig demonstrates that he's more than just dimwitted muscle by planning and leading his first job, a complex robbery at sea that is both lucrative and a graphic reminder of how the Codys' thrilling outlaw lifestyle leaves plenty of damage in its wake.

As Smurf feels herself losing control of her boys, she pulls grandson J more closely toward her, rewarding him with new responsibilities, better quarters and an education in money laundering. She even lets him see the storage facility of which his uncles know nothing, where Smurf has squirreled away a secret horde of valuables and cash over the years. (The facility was introduced in Season One, and it was bound to become a major plot point.) Smurf's blandishments ensure that, when her conflict with Baz finally erupts into open warfare, J remains on her side. Indeed, by the end of the season, he may be the only family member on whom she can still depend.

Hovering on the edges of the Cody circle are two very different women. Lucy (Carolina Guerra) used to be Baz's girl-on-the-side, but with Cath's disappearance she has moved into first position. Observant, ambitious and fully conversant with the underworld through her brother Marco (Joseph Julian Soria), with whom the Codys used to run drugs, Lucy pushes Baz to be his own man. But can Baz really depend on her or, like Smurf, is she pursuing some unknown agenda of her own? Even more unpredictable is Nicky (Molly Gordon), who began the series as J's high school girlfriend, then jumped into a creepy liaison with the much older Craig (yes, that's her boyfriend's uncle), when J broke off the relationship in an ultimately futile effort to protect Nicky from being sucked into his family's world. In Season Two, Nicky moves into Smurf's home, even as Craig has grown tried of the needy teen and her constant demands for both attention and cocaine. Nicky and J even end up sharing a bathroom—it's Smurf's idea, of course—and the sexual tension between the former teen lovers is as powerful as it is awkward. But Nicky isn't the same girl J used to know. She's acquired a taste for the criminal lifestyle, and it's unclear by the end of the season whether she's destined to become a member of the family or one of its many casualties.

Interesting new faces appear throughout the season, including Smurf's longtime fence, the elegantly bespectacled Monica (Tembi Locke), and her efficiently amoral attorney (Laura San Giacomo). A more dangerous visage is that of Javi (Alex Meraz), an unwelcome visitor from Smurf's past who thinks she owes him and is willing to hurt everyone around her in his determination to collect.

Animal Kingdom: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cinematographer Loren S. Yaconelli returned for all of Animal Kingdom's second season, which was shot digitally and, like all of the Warner Archive Collection's TV Blu-rays, is delivered to WAC in the form of a finished 1080p master from which the 1080i and 480i broadcast versions were derived. Unlike its film releases, where WAC's tasks include element scans and color correction, its responsibilities for current TV are limited to compression and disc authoring. But these, too, can have a significant impact on the final product, and Season Two of Animal Kingdom is a textbook demonstration of their importance.

Season One's ten episodes were evenly divided between two BD-50 discs, and Warner and TNT didn't even use all of the available space. The result was an average bitrate of around 14 Mbps and an image that I described as "serviceable, but not stellar". Season Two is a different story. WAC has spread its thirteen episodes across four discs, three BD-50s with four episodes each, and a BD-25 containing the final episode and the longest extra, and they've used nearly all the available space. The result is nearly twice the average bitrate of Season One, at around 27 Mbps or higher, and a vibrant and vital image that does full justice to the series signature contrast between dark deeds and the cheerfully colorful brightness of the Cody family's California environment. Primaries are bright and fully saturated, blacks are deep and solid, and the beautifully shaded palette of blue waves, earth-toned countryside and quietly flamboyant production design is vividly rendered. Compare these discs to the broadcast versions (which I DVR'd at high quality for comparison), and their superiority is immediately obvious. The Blu-ray image has a brightness, depth and texture that the bit-starved broadcast and streaming versions can't hope to match. The Season One Blu-rays didn't offer a noteworthy improvement over what TNT showed, but WAC's discs for Season Two bring the Codys' world more graphically to life than ever before. The effect should be visible even on smaller screens, but the larger your display, the more obvious the difference will be.

Note that Animal Kingdom's episodes typically run forty-seven to fifty minutes, which is about five to eight minutes longer than the typical network hour-long series. TNT promotes the show as having "limited commercial interruptions", but even so, the broadcast versions usually run over an hour. The extended running time adds up to over an hour and a half in additional total length, which is all the more reason why WAC's decision to limit each disc to no more than four episodes is commendable. The Codys need all the room they can get.

Animal Kingdom: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Season Two of Animal Kingdom arrives with a 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, that is similar in quality and style to the previous season. While the mix can't (and doesn't try) to compete with major action films, it effectively supplies a suggestive sonic environment for the California beaches and hilly residential neighborhoods where the series' creatures hunt and play. Season Two even adds an interesting new location with a successful megachurch that has its own pop music band in the giant auditorium upstairs and a secure vault room in the basement. Gunfire is rare, but far more frequent is the roar and whine of power tools, since so many of the Codys' jobs involve elaborate construction tasks (they're like a blue-collar IMF). Both weapons and implements register with authority, as do the vehicular pursuits on both land and sea. The din of parties at the Cody family pool has largely been replaced by scenes of a lively bar that's become their preferred hangout, and in such environments, the rear speakers are effectively engaged, although surround activity remains limited to ambiance. Dialogue is properly localized and mostly clear, although I found myself having to replay an occasional line. Composers Samuel Jones and Alexis March continued their scoring duties, and the series has wisely retained the jagged opening theme by Atticus Ross, which remains set to a montage of tattoos in progress.

Animal Kingdom: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1)


• Disc 1
• 4. Broken Boards (0:21)


• Disc 2
• 5. Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1:03)
• 6. Cry Havoc (0:44)
• 7. Dig (2:50)
• 8. Grace (4:56): Note that most of one scene deleted from this episode (the conversation between Pope and Smurf in the kitchen) has been incorporated into episode 9, "Custody".


• Disc 3
• 10. Treasure (0:52)
• 11. The Leopard (2:01)
• 12. You Will Be Gutted (3:39)


• Disc 4
• 13. Betrayal (4:43)



• Dissecting Pope (1080; 1.78:1; 5:10): Showrunners John Wells and Jonathan Lisco and actor Shawn Hatosy dig into the behavior and psychology of the eldest Cody son.

Animal Kingdom: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Season Two of Animal Kingdom takes the Codys far beyond the small-time conception of David Michôd's original film, and it diversifies and intensifies the family conflicts more than any single film could encompass. By the end of the season, the house that Smurf built lies in ruins (or so it appears). It will be interesting to see how the indomitable queen of the Codys attempts to rebuild, what new allies she reaches for, and what new predators lurk on the horizon. As both entertainment and a demonstration of how TV should be presented on Blu-ray, WAC's release of Animal Kingdom's Season Two is highly recommended.