I first saw Arrested
Development when I was a sophomore in college. One of my roommates had a twelve inch TV that
he’d brought from his parent’s house.
While we played WoW together,
grinding our way through instances, cutting down enemies, helping each other
out with quests, he’d have it on in the background. Usually it would be tuned to some aging VHS,
but once a week, late in our second semester of living together, Arrested Development would plop down on
its screen. Some floor-neighbors would
plop down on our floor and we’d all sit and watch each episode. It was one of the few cultural artifacts that
could tear us away from World of Warcraft
for even a few seconds.
When I left Minnesota for Ireland, I left that part of my
life behind. I also gave up gaming,
mostly. I lost touch with most of the
people I loved, for the most part. School
work wasn’t too challenging, so I took up the habit of sullenly drinking
overpriced Irish liquor (so rendered by a combination of a 25% value added tax
and a 50% sin tax applied by the Irish government). But drinking was, as mentioned earlier,
incredibly expensive, and so I looked for new distractions. Eventually I fell into torrenting.
This was in the early, wild west days of torrenting, the
days when torrents were, more often than not, viruses. These were the days of mislabeled files and
garbled, arcane search filters. The
Pirate Bay was still a relatively unknown superstructure running through the
internet, and the infamous Napster lawsuits had just begun to rumble, and the
first behemoth peer to peer services had just begun to crumble, giving way to a
scattered second generation of quieter, local network based sharing services.
This was in the days when i-Tunes was fresh and user friendly.
So torrenting was an adventure. I’d spend hours looking through torrents, altering
search criteria and working to filter through bogus hits to find real episodes
of real shows I actually wanted to see (and also pornography). Through a combination of luck and diligence I
managed to get my hands on entire episodes, then eventually entire seasons, of
American TV (and some pretty astonishingly filthy pornography). One of these shows was Arrested Development.
I’d hop on to Pirate Bay and search diligently for episodes
of Arrested Development the day after
they premiered on network TV. Such was
the era we lived in: someone would have to record the episode they saw on TV,
convert it to a digital format and then upload it to the internet. These were the dark days, the early 2000s. But in the midst of these dark days, quiet
young nerds like me could find solace in searching out bits and pieces of data,
and, thanks to my efforts, my entire little shithole Irish dorm was amply
supplied with TV that was imported, not from Australia or Britain, but from the
good old US of A, the cultural capital of the world. Through a combination of file transfers and
floor meetups, a community of sorts was formed, and I found a slice of what I’d
left behind. I consumed the handful of
shows I got my hands on adamantly, watching episodes of Arrested Development back to back to back, occupying entire days
with fevered watchings. I wrote at best tepidly and began to slide into a
profound depression, but Arrested
Development remained a constant pleasure in my life, a touchstone for
happier times. It, in a very real way,
kept me sane during a dark time in my life, a time before the world felt so
very, very connected.
When it was cancelled, I took it in stride. Mostly.
I only freaked out a little. But
when I heard it was coming back, really coming back, on Netflix, a handful of
years ago, I flipped out in full force.
Well, kind of. I expressed
excitement and didn’t get my panties in a bunch about the time frame for its
appearance in the real, physical world.
I loved the show, but I’d ruined relationships by putting unrealistic
expectations on objects of my affection before.
I didn’t want to trash something as precious as what I had with Arrested Development the way I’d fucked
up my relationships with, say, human women.
All this is just background to what I really want to talk
about: the new season of Arrested Development
and the vitriolic reaction it endured when it premiered two months ago.
Not to say that everyone hated the new season of Arrested Development. The
Washington Post published a particularly superlative rundown on the series
that deals with both its shortcomings and strengths quite eloquently. But the majority of reviewers and cultural
commentators loudly decried the new Arrested
Development for its density and reliance on unlikeable, unrelatable
characters. They wanted it to be more
like the old Arrested Development:
dense and reliant on unlikeable, unrelatable characters.
I’m being somewhat facetious: a lot of the reception seemed
to rely on the same kind of anticipatory dream logic that fans conjure whenever
something is about to be resurrected: they want it to be good, they want it to
be a masterpiece of its art form, and, frankly, they’re used to being
disappointed. After watching reboots of
classic franchises by luminaries such as George Lucas collapse upon themselves
so dramatically and stupendously, it’s difficult to be too stern with cultural
commentators who expect disappointment from their heroes whenever they proudly
declare a plan to revisit an ostensibly unfinished project. But something about the targeting of Arrested Development was particularly
strange and, in a sense, nasty. Arrested Development was never perfect,
and many of the problems of the original series carried through to the
resurrected Netflix program. The show denies
the supremacy of traditional sitcom episode format, and pokes fun at it while
cannily using it to land jokes. It’s
dense and full of foreshadowing, so much so that many of the series jokes can
only be uncovered by rewatching old episodes with knowledge from later
shows. The new Arrested Development leans even harder on these habits, crafting a
plot that feels incomplete until it’s been watched and rewatched and
reconsidered for a good long while. It’s
snobby, just like the old show and, as such, it isn’t for everyone. The original Arrested Development didn’t really find its critical champions
until it was nearly cancelled, and the audience that Fox never found for the
show (thanks to a profoundly dysfunctional strategy for promoting its stronger
properties prevalent during the mid-2000s) picked it up on DVD or, like me,
through file sharing websites.
But the show rewarded its snobby, haughty viewers with some
singular and incredible, simultaneously low and high brow, comedy. High concept, tremendously relevant
commentary on a vitriolic political situation and a nigh psychotic identity
crisis burning through America was juxtaposed with pratfalls and gay
jokes. And the blend was sublime,
presented with such density that I can still, after having watched the original
three seasons dozens of times, catch new information with repeat viewings.
The new Arrested
Development season delivers on these counts: it’s still resoundingly
relevant, smart, and low and high brow.
It doubles down on its attempt to skewer the tropes of the sitcom
kingdom by eliminating the likeability of its
one-time-not-really-but-pretend-for-us-everyman of Michael Bluth and recasting
him as a self-serving man, horrified of failure and incapable of genuine
communication, traits the character was manifesting in the shows second and
third seasons that never really had time to get center stage.
The new series also goes one step further by designing a
show for “binge viewing” and reviewing.
The majority of sitcoms are designed to be viewed once a week and, as
such, feel a need to remind you of what each character is doing or would
normally be doing if they were the center of attention at any given
moment. That means you add things in
like B stories and sometimes shoehorn in asides from characters who really
don’t need to be in a particular scene.
I’ve been watching Orange is the
New Black on Netflix of late, and it’s particularly guilty of this sitcom
writing crutch. Kohan’s previous series,
Weeds, also engaged in the practice
of throwing in “me too” moments from characters without any bearing on present
story or arc. The new season of Arrested Development is totally
unconcerned with both episode format and with episode length, and shows this
“who gives a fuck” attitude by excising B stories from its structure
entirely. Each episode is just an A
story which, if you don’t watch any other episodes, stands on its own. But within that A story is a series of
connecting moments which generate an implied “B” story that binds the various
episodes together. None of this is
explicitly showcased in the episodes, and many of the more story critical B
moments can be missed if you don’t pay close attention. I didn’t get who the Ostrich Shaman was until
my third viewing, and I’m still unpacking Maeby’s story. There’s some brilliant play with story
structure going on here, and Mitchell Hurwitz is totally unconcerned with
showing you how clever he is. If you’re
going to get it, you’ll get it on your own.
This is where Arrested
Development shines: it attempts to utilize the monomaniacal focus that
services like Netflix permit viewers to apply to their shows in order to
generate a narrative that operates on its own terms, but only really shines
when taken in as a whole-cloth product and mulled over carefully by
viewers. That means that it doesn’t
really sit well with professional reviewers, people who, by nature of their
trade, are forced to engage with cultural creations as products briefly,
furtively, and then move on without digesting them. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that
reviewers of any stripe are really great at.
Ask a group of professional writers about their weaknesses and you’ll
hear them get very, very quiet (though I suppose that’s true of most people,
it’s a particularly conspicuous trait for a group of people who make their
living poking metaphoric holes in things).
This is a pattern that manifests particularly often in the
discussion of video games which are, by merit of their price tag, particularly
easy to look at as products. Reviewers
are forced to play through them quickly, rotely even, and then examine them in
a cultural vacuum with minimal opportunity to discuss or reflect upon
them. It’s a great recipe for generating
a lackluster discussion, and watching it applied to something like the new
season of Arrested Development is
particularly frustrating.
I know how this sounds.
I once, after telling a friend I disliked a very well celebrated poet’s
work, was treated to a series of comments on how “appreciating her work
requires reading it again and again,” implying that I was incapable of such
reflection, or that my dislike of the poet’s work came not from problems within
the work, but with my inability to access it properly. I’m not trying to say that people who don’t
like the new season of Arrested
Development are lazy or stupid. It’s
not for everyone, and even after repeated viewings, you might not like it. It’s coarse and offensive, and so intensely
dense that it demands your full attention every second it’s on screen. It’s the rare show that insists that we keep
our eyes glued to each frame, and that’s not what you always want. Sometimes you want something on in the
background.
Arrested Development
can be that show as well, but that’s not where it excels. This is a demanding, at times exhausting
show. It’s one of the few shows I
actually watch, rather than put on in the background while playing Mechwarrior. And it’s a satisfying resurrection of a
modern classic. Everything that made the
original show great is still right there.
It even manages to make contemporary Michael Cera endearing and human instead
of simpering and one dimensional (though this seems to be Cera’s tack in
general lately, as he takes on a broader range of more self-aware and engaged
roles – I don’t think I’d blame Cera’s typecasting post-Juno on the
actor). It’s great. It utilizes its cast expertly, and while many
of the directors who made the late seasons of Arrested Development so incredible were not involved (Jay
Chandrasekhar is sorely missed) it’s still doing something incredible on a
moment to moment basis.
So detach yourself from the varied hype machines, sit down
and watch Arrested Development for a
few hours with friends, snacks, and whatever drugs you like to do while you
watch TV. Assuming you liked the
original show. If you didn’t, don’t
sweat it. There’s plenty of other
television on the internet these days.
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