About “Arrested Development”
Over the weekend I watched four or five of the new Netflixed episodes of the series. Some thoughts, in no particular order:
* I don’t begrudge Mitch Hurwitz or anyone else associated with the show the extra cash and I hope that everyone in the AD production orbit got something nice out of Netflix.
* That said, I’ll finish watching this slate of episodes only out of a dreary sense of duty. It’s like the sad-sacks who hung around into the fifth season of Burn Notice: You know that you’re not even getting the product warmed-over any more. But you still stick around to see how it ends.
* Seven years doesn’t seem like such a long time, except that it is. As Brendan, the sage of WWTDD once wrote, “Time is slowly turning us all into monsters.”
(Except for Judy Greer. She looked great. And she’s so funny that she can’t get enough work so far as I’m concerned.)
* For me, the low point of the original series was the six episode arc featuring Charlize Theron, which centered around “Mr. F.” Those episodes weren’t great, but they still had gold mixed with the dross. Nothing I’ve seen so far in the Netflixed rendition of AD even approaches that level of quality.
* One of the things I loved about AD flashbacks was seeing young Lucille and young George Sr. His comb-over was great, and so was her long hair. Remember the ’70s MotherBoy Lucille? For me, the Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen subtracted value rather than adding it.
* I’d say the same about the enormous cavalcade of cameos. And about the entire idea of incorporating Imagine Entertainment and Brian Grazer. There’s a really fine line between Hollywood satirizing itself and faux-satirization that comes off as preening. For me, this played much closer to the Burn Hollywood Burn end of the spectrum.
* I don’t want to give too much thought to this, because the truth is, once this Netflix version is over I’m going to relegate it to the same dungeon of my mind where I have Jar-Jar Binks and the Buffy series finale tied up and locked in a box. I refuse to let it taint my enjoyment of the original series.
But it seems to me that the key change is that Hurwitz–intentionally or not–chose to make the characters repellent for this Netflix run. In the original series, Michael and George Michael are the moral centers of the universe. But even in the human demolition derby that is the Bluth Family, no one is irredeemable. And to the extent that these characters were sad, they were funny-sad.
In this new series Hurwitz seems to have evolved the characters so that “funny-sad” has been replaced by “tragic-sad” or “pathetic-sad.” No one has anything redeeming about them and even our moral centers, Michael and George Michael, are pathetic, self-involved idiots. Forget not having anyone to root for in this series–there’s not even a character I want to spend time with.
I haven’t seen any reaction to the new episodes yet, but I’d be really, really surprised if they were well-received for precisely this point. Funny is subjective and people can have different opinions on whether or not the humor in the new AD works. (For me it doesn’t.) But the change in characterization of the Bluths is something that, I think, will really turn the audience off, whether or not they realize why it’s given them a cold feeling.
* This is only tangentially related, but if this is the future of streaming content, stop the ride; I want to get off.
A long time ago before anyone could actually stream anything other than movie trailers on the Apple Trailers Website, we were all promised that streaming meant that one day we’d have access to every movie and every TV show ever made, from anywhere. It was going to be awesome.
The only wet blankets were the people asking, “Hey, how’s all that intellectual property going to be managed?” But this was the INTERNET we were talking about. Information wanted to be free! New! Now! Go!
Well, our streaming future is just about here and what do we have? We have Netflix moving explicitly away from the idea that it will offer everything and instead embracing “expert programming.” Which is corporate-speak for “spending our money on original series instead of rights for existing programming.” So instead of paying for rights to older content, Netflix makes underwhelming programming that gets a lot of attention. For a bit. Until the next stunt, anyway.
Other than Netflix, what do you do? You hope that you can buy a copy of the stream from a different platform, say iTunes or Amazon. But then you don’t actually own the content. And if they go out of business, or change their ToS, well, best of luck to you.
