Well, how about it, Office fans? A mighty fine season for television's best comedy debuts on Blu today!

Also, a splendid review from Blu-ray.com:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies.php?id=5696&show=review

I will now go out and make purchase at retail. Wait here for impressions!

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/38400/office-season-five/

I've watched a few episodes, and I have to say...

Nice. Not bad.

Wife and I took in a few eps last night - PQ and AQ are pretty darn good. The NBC telecasts exhibit awful macroblocking that I didn't see on blu-ray. The "Stress Relief" episode that aired after the super bowl is just truly classic stuff.

This show is one that consistently delivers, even more so on video. The deleted scenes for every season are almost, if not more, fun than what made it it to broadcast. It's great to see it on Blu-ray, although I haven't made it past the first disc yet.

Having watched only bits & pieces of this show, where should a newbie like me start? Obviously only season 5 is available on Blu-ray for now.

Having watched only bits & pieces of this show, where should a newbie like me start? Obviously only season 5 is available on Blu-ray for now.I would say start with season 1 to get a good idea of the characters, although you could conceivably skip over it. It was only 6 episodes, and the first episode was an fairly awful line-by-line remake of the UK version. However, it got very good very quickly, and some of the "best of the worst" moments (particularly for the Michael and Dwight characters) where you're cringing and laughing at the same time are in the 2nd and 3rd episodes.

Like most things shot on fancy 1080p digital cameras, it looks as good as you'd expect it to, given the faux-documentary visual style of the show. The encoding is solid, surprisingly, they even got the video bitrates into the 30mbps range in what I saw so far, which isn't typical for TV series where they could've crammed more episodes onto a disc and saved a buck.

The first and some of the second season had a more "documentary" quality instead of the more conventional line-after-line format of later seasons. Whenever I watch the first season, I'm surprised by how much silence there is, how we mostly hang around the characters until they do something funny, and how realistic the acting is. You really feel like there's a guy with a camera in front of people who aren't actors. A lot seems improvised but B.J. Novak said the episodes were actually heavily scripted which just shows how good the acting was.

Here's to hoping they bring out additional seasons.

Yeah, I'd buy 'em, that's for sure. I'm pretty happy knowing every season after this, I'll be seeing it on Blu eventually.