HD Heads-Up: March 7

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is finalising a NZ Blu-ray release date for House of Cards’ third season. It’s been delayed by nearly a year because of a Netflix stuff-up over posting the series on its NZ site. Despite it being known for months that a NZ broadcaster didn’t own the rights to the White House drama, it was only on Friday that the streaming service literally got with the programme and put all four seasons online. Having waited this long, fans should hold off for the Blu-ray of S3 if picture quality is paramount: “The Blu-ray release of House of Cards: The Complete Third Season features another first-rate 1080p/AVC-encoded video presentation, that could only be bested by a 4K edition.” And that doesn’t mean Netflix’s compressed 4K streaming. The BD also boasts an “entertaining” HD documentary about the first three seasons that’s “a really educational featurette for television and film buffs” …

Fans of The Walking Dead won’t want to miss tonight’s episode (TV2, 9.30), which Variety says “may be the most terrifying yet … Last week’s episode may have suffered from a terminal case of telling instead of showing, but episode 612 confidently reversed that trend, recapturing the humour, energy and tension of The Next World as if Knots Untie was nothing but a pothole on the race towards the finale.” Don’t read the link until after you’ve seen it — instead, check out The Hollywood Reporter’s interview with Fear the Walking Dead showrunner Dave Ericskson about his plans for season two: “We’re not doing Love Boat with zombies.” It premieres April 10 in the US and expect SoHo to screen it within 24 hours …

TVNZ OnDemand has notched up more than one million subscribers a year after launching its revamped free platform. Shortland Street is the most viewed show, with 250,000 streams each week, while new local drama Filthy Rich has topped 170,000 streams in its first three weeks. TVNZ OnDemand Shorts has recorded more than 430,000 streams since launching in December and 40% of all streams come from mobile viewing …

ABC has renewed a slew of TV2 dramas, including How to Get Away with Murder, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Once Upon a Time, Agents of SHIELD (which airs first OnDemand) and the soon to debut Quantico. TV2 comedies that will be back in 2017 include black-ish and America’s Funniest Home Videos while Prime will benefit from Modern Family being picked up for an eighth season (season seven will be the first since season four to air here in HD) and Four from new runs of The Goldbergs and Fresh Off the Boat. A new ABC drama destined for TV One, The Family, has opened to so-so ratings and reviews in the US, where THR dismissed it as “manipulative, poorly written” while the New York Times acknowledged it was “guilty-pleasure fare, but, at least after two episodes, it holds interest rather well” …

Glee good guy Matthew Morrison (Will Schuester) is about to reveal his dark side in The Good Wife, having just joined the second half of the drama’s final season as an assistant US attorney gunning for Peter Florrick. “I like playing a bad guy,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s something that I think I do well because I’m the anti-bad guy … I was supposed to do four episodes and it looks like I’m going to be going all the way to very end now. If I do all of them, then it will be seven episodes.” He makes his first appearance on tonight’s US broadcast, which should air here on May 3 …

Lined up for this week’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Prime are: Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler Oakley and The Who (10.30 Monday); Ryan Reynolds, Katie Holmes and Thomas Rhett (10.30 Tuesday); Donald Trump, Ken Jeong and Cam (10.30 Wednesday); Penelope Cruz, Peyton Manning, Magic Johnson and Halsey (10.35 Thursday); and Hillary Clinton, Lucy Liu and Flo Rida (11.30 Friday) …