I’m going to beg. If you or anyone you know is counted by Nielsen, please have your television tuned to Fox from 7:00-7:30 this evening. A new set of Arrested Development episodes begins airing tonight, and barring an extraordinary ratings surge, this run (probably 6 Mondays, although that is not clear) will be the last gasp of AD on Fox, and more likely than not, anywhere on television.
There is nothing else on. It is a Monday in December. Every other network is showing a rerun. The Discoverys, Historys, HGTVs, Food Networks andMTVs are not going to show anything tonight that they haven’t aired before and will not air again.
Please help us save our show.
There’s been a strange and awful thing I’ve noticed in the last few weeks, and I know I’m not the only one. TV history is littered with the corpses of series that clung to life for a short while and died, despite the best efforts of a devoted fanbase. The fans of such a show are viewed as eccentrics, harmless cranks whose overwhelming love for “their” show – Star Trek, Firefly, My So-Called Life – is as charming and admirable as it is objectively goofy.
Not Arrested Development fans.
We are hated.
Matt Roush, in a recent TV Guide article (which, unthinkably, don’t seem to be archived), mentioned that he can never remember receiving so much mail directed against a group of Save Our Show campaigners. The tenor of America at large – such as they notice us – seems to be “Shut up! We want our War at Home!”
I think we fans bear much of the blame for this. For one, it is an undeniable fact that Arrested Development survived far longer time than any show with its ratings and price tag could have expected, and I think many people – the Firefly, Wonderfalls, etc. fans – can be excused for finding little patience with us for whining over a “mere” 53 episodes.
More importantly, though, is the tenor of most of the AD eulogies I’ve seen around. By and large, they express the opinion (and I don’t mean to exempt myself, I’ve done exactly the same) that Arrested Development died because American viewers were too bone-stupid to like the show. I can understand pretty clearly why that would engender bad feelings towards myself and my comrades-in-arms.
But the fact of that matter is that Arrested Development truly is a show for smart people. Not because it name-drops Kant and Proust (that would be the perpetually ratings-starved obscurity Frasier), but because it does not hold the audience’s hand. Ever. Watching Arrested Development is a matter of devoting yourself fully to the ride. You can’t turn it on while you’re walking the treadmill. You can’t make dinner and watch it. You must pay absolute attention for 21 minutes. There is no braying laugh track to tell you what is funny. And unlike most of its single-camera bretheren, it does not subscribe to any of the vocabulary of the sitcom to telegraph its jokes (take Malcom in the Middle. By all means a revolutionary show, but it still builds its jokes setup-beat-punchline, and is generally paced like a much-smarter Everybody Loves Raymond.) It is, more than any other show in the history of American network television, an intellectual investment.
I love Arrested Development. I love it more than any other narrative television series in history. I cannot name one series to have produced, in an entire run, the number of formal innovations that AD indulged in during its pilot. I remember being amazed at how the BBC version of The Office played with reality television conventions, but Arrested Development knocks it out of the park. I have been fond recently of proclaiming that it is not only the first sitcom with an omniscient third-person narrator, but the first sitcom to explore the meta-narrative implications of possessing an omniscient third-person narrator.
The cast is one of the most uniformly brilliant ever assembled. In even the greatest ensembles, there are usually one or two clinkers. Not here. All nine members of the main cast bring their A-game to each and every episode.
And above all, it is deeply felt and humane. For all its radicalism, Arrested Development is a show about a family, and it proudly subscribes to the tradition of a warm moment at the end where two people realize that they need each other. Lessons are learned on this show, nearly every week.
Michael: “What have we always said is the most important thing?”
George Michael: “Breakfast.”
Michael: “…family.”
George Michael: “Family, right. I thought you meant of the things you eat.”