By Kelly Rausch

After months of reading my friend’s Facebook status updates about watching HBO’s “The Wire” on DVD, I finally decided to rent a few discs and see what all the fuss was about. But this column isn’t about “The Wire” and its good guys versus bad guys, twists and turns. I want to talk about joys and dangers of watching television shows on DVD.

I love being able to watch good series that I didn’t know about when they aired, or to catch up on early seasons I missed when I came to a show late, as was the case with “True Blood.” For a few weeks last summer, I was immersed in fictional Bon Temps with Sookie, Jason and vampire Bill.

It didn’t matter that the summer T.V. lineup was terrible because every night I had a new (to me) episode of “True Blood” to watch. And when the second season premiered later in the summer, I was all caught up and ready to go.

But such concentrated viewership of a particular program can lead to withdrawal symptoms if, once the DVDs are finished, there’s nothing to replace it with. It’s hard to quit a show cold turkey after having gorged yourself on it nightly for weeks. It’s bad enough for current shows whose new seasons don’t start for several more weeks or months, but it’s especially depressing for shows that have ended permanently.

If you’re like me and you rent the DVDs then you run the common risk of getting stuck mid-season because some tool has been holding onto Season One, Disc Two of “Mad Men” for three weeks. “Very long wait” in your online Blockbuster queue translates into “you might as well buy it at Target because you will never, ever be able to finish this series in a timely manner if you rely on us.”

You can’t just skip ahead, so you’re stuck on someone else’s schedule. Or you end up calling all the local video stores to see who’s got it on stock and you start to feel like maybe you have a problem since you’re investing a lot of time into tracking one little DVD down.

It can be worth the wait, though. I never would have gotten into “The Sopranos” if I hadn’t been able to catch up on the first two seasons on DVD. Plus, if you don’t want to pay for premium channels, you can just watch those shows you’re really interested in when they come out on DVD rather than pay a monthly satellite or cable fee.

I don’t recommend buying T.V. shows on DVD unless you’re really, really into a particular show. In theory, it seems like a good idea, but I’ve never found myself wanting to re-watch a television episode more than once so it would be a big waste of money. Just like no one likes reruns they’ve already seen on T.V., why would you want to pay for them?

Also, if your friends find out you own the entire “Seinfeld” series you can bet they’re going to want to borrow your discs, which means you can just as assuredly bet that at least one if not more discs will never be returned to you.

In the midst of all the quality programming that’s been released on DVD, I’m amazed at how many truly awful shows get released, too. Did you know you can buy “The Nick and Jessica Variety Hour” on DVD, or the sixth season of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch?” Aren’t there some things that, aired once on television, need never be seen again?

Some series can lose some of their specialness when you’ve got 44 hours of it available at your fingertips as opposed to having it meted out by the networks one hour at a time. In my experience, the saturation can dilute the magic.

There’s not much time to contemplate all the creepy weirdness of “Twin Peaks” when you watch every episode in a marathon in your dorm’s basement Easter weekend of your senior year (just take my word for it).

Now excuse me while I call my local Blockbuster to track down Season One Disc Three of “The Wire.”