Like extended family gatherings you look forward to attending, each of the 13 episodes on the four-disc The Shield Season 7: The Final Act (Sony, $60) comes with a commentary track by the cast and crew. The tracks not only give you an excuse to revisit the series' memorable final year, but illustrate just how harmonious a unit the show's creators had become.

Fans probably won't be able to resist starting with the last episode, Family Meeting. Series creator Shawn Ryan and actors Michael Chiklis (Vic Mackey), Benito Martinez (Aceveda), Jay Karnes (Dutch) and David Rees Snell (Ronnie) sit down together to reminisce about the making of the finale, as well as the series as a whole.

Other commentary tracks in the set focus a little too much on the dry mechanics of acting (Walton Goggins, we mean you), but this chat is spirited as Ryan asks the actors how they thought the series was going to end before they read the final script.

Rees Snell thought he'd be the last man standing. Martines assumed he and Chiklis would clean up the city and save the day. Karnes thought his character would be the one to take Mackey down, and Chiklis figured he'd end up in a witness-protection program. All of them were wrong, a fact in which Ryan takes obvious pride, although he admits that ``we talked about killing everybody at some point.''

Other extras in the set, which presents the show in wide screen, include the half-hour featurette Nobody Expects to Lose, Nobody Expects to Die: The Shield's Final Season, with lots of raw footage of the actors as they collaborate with the writers and directors. (At one point, CCH Pounder flatly refuses to do what one of the writers suggests because she can't bring herself to make her character ``that impotent.'')

Another half-hour featurette, Last Call: The Final Episode, centers on the emotions that ran high during the filming. Watching cast members becoming teary-eyed, you realize just how much these actors liked each other and how close they had grown. If they never appear in anything else, they'll have this terrific show to call their own.