Birds of Prey is a comic book that features the wheelchair-bound Barbara Gordon as Oracle, a computer genius, as well as Black Canary – also known as Dinah Lance. In the comic, both are 30-something heroines who play hero but also address midlife issues and not being “sweet young things” anymore.

So what is the show like? Well… not much like the comic, as it turns out. Oracle is there and well-cast, but Black Canary is transformed into a teenage rookie hero whose biggest concern is finding a solid natural acne treatment and who doesn’t even appear in every episode, and the star of the show quickly becomes Huntress, the alleged offspring of Batman and Catwoman, forcing the show to exist in a weird, post-Batman universe at a time just before Warner Brothers was about to launch … Batman Begins. Huh?

Aside from ignoring the comic book, and changing the character of villain Harley Quinn considerably, each episode was full of in-costume heroes (Smallville’s cardinal rule was no cape, no blue tights and no flying) and was mired in comic book terminology (demi-humans, for example) that left the mainstream audience confused.

Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of Huntress being considered a demi-human when neither Batman nor Catwoman possessed superpowers of any kind. Huh? In fact, “Huh?” is a word that’ll come up a lot while viewing this four-disc, complete series collection of Birds of Prey. Add in the occasional “what were they thinking” and you’ll begin to wonder just how Mark Millar and Alfred Gough struck on the right formula the first time around with Smallville, but were so off-target this time.

Still, Birds of Prey isn’t completely lacking in appeal; there are some nice commentaries, a half-decent collection of special features, and a handful of episodes that indicated the seeds were there for the show to really find itself and become watchable, if given enough time. Unfortunately, Birds of Prey never quite found itself in time and died an early death without the “back nine episodes” ever being approved for airing on The WB.

Birds of Prey isn’t a terrible DVD collection, but it does stand as a testament to just how difficult it is to get a superhero-based show to play well to a mainstream audience. If Smallville is the handbook on “what to do,” then Birds of Prey is the user’s manual on “what not to do.” This was a show that would have benefited quite a bit from the presence of Joss Whedon.