It's Started

As a huge fan of Arrested Development (who, aside from AV Club staffers, isn’t?), I’m obviously very excited about the return of the show.  95 percent of that excitement is based on the opportunity to see new, hopefully hilarious episodes.  The other 5 percent?  The chance to make fun of the myriad dumb-ass articles that Arrested Development’s return will inevitably produce. 

Wait, you say AD hasn’t premiered yet?  Don’t worry—the idiocy has gotten started early!  Take it away, AV Club, for a colloquy between Josh Modell (reasonable) and Erik Adams (the horror!). 

Even though The A.V. Club hasn’t taken the “Oh my God, of course it’s going to be the best thing ever!” tone, we’re still a little bit guilty of building up the hype machine to unreasonable proportions. On the other hand, it’s our job to report on the stuff that we’re excited about, and that our audience wants to know about. Erik, are we doing anything wrong by contributing to this hype?

This is the dumbest possible idea for an article.  Let’s examine why, by going through the possible answers for the question that Josh asks.

Option 1: No, we are not doing anything wrong by contributing to this hype. 

Great!  Hype it up!  It’s Arrested Development!  It’s awesome.  No need to waste space through useless agita.

Or, Option 2: Yes, we are doing something wrong by contributing to this hype.

Then don’t continue to do so by writing this article. 

Actually, both options have a certain something in common.  Let me summarize: Don’t write this fucking article.

But they do:  so, Erik Adams, what are your concerns about the upcoming season?

The seven years between new episodes essentially rendered Arrested Development into a brand new show,

Oh, a brand new show, is it?  That has the same title, cast, creator, writer, and narrator as the original?  Is this some Borgesian “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” thing where the new AD will entirely resemble the original in every respect but somehow be transformed by the passage of time and the varying intention of its new author?

and it ought to be treated as such, as something that may have to take its time to find its feet and locate its voice.

Do they give out talking points at the AV Club?  Whatever show any reviewer is talking about, gotta say that it’s “new” and that it needs to “locate its voice” like it’s a first year Fiction MFA student.  Because you realize this is verbatim what our good friend Todd said about this season of Community. 

Only problem?  This point makes even less sense when applied to AD.  Because you realize that this isn’t a traditional linear series, right, where one episode was filmed after another?  From what I’ve read, it sounds like the episodes were not made in sequence, and they’re not even necessarily supposed to be watched in sequence.  So it’s not going to “find its voice” after a couple of episodes, like Todd kept insisting Community would.  Don’t keep applying the same dumb-ass points when they don’t work with even the most basic material circumstances of the series.

Then again, you can supposedly watch the new episodes in any order you want, so maybe this is all moot.

Yeah, it is.  So don’t write it, then.  

Intention be damned, it’s difficult to refrain from adding to the mountain of hype because the prevailing conversation around the series has been nothing but hype for nearly a decade.

You seem not to fully understand the meaning of “hype.”  If by hype, you mean “deserved praise,” then yes, the last decade has been filled with hype for Arrested Development.

We’ve seen an echo of this in the heir to Arrested Development’s “much loved, little watched” throne: Community, which, in a bit of portent that means absolutely nothing, just wrapped its own divisive fourth season.

If by divisive, you mean abjectly terrible, then yes, this season was divisive.  I’m glad that you included that “bit of portent that means absolutely nothing.”  Totally essential. 

Also, I love Community, but Arrested Development is at least twice the show that Community is. 

But since there’s no middle ground when it comes to talking about Community, it was not enough to stick with the show during its awkward season-four adolescence:

Not a fucking adolescence!  No, no. You will not anthropomorphize a show. Now you’re saying even the shows themselves go on “journeys.”  NBC fired Dan Harmon, for fuck’s sake.  The fourth season of Community was more of a prolonged and pitiable death spiral. 

Community had to be “defended” or “saved,”

Let me explain something to you about your supposed “argument.”  Presumably you’re arguing that discourse about Community is polarized—people either want to defend it or attack it.  So the choice is, “defended” or “attacked.”  Not “saved.”  I have no fucking idea what that means.  Sounds kind of similar to “defended.” 

and that led to a lot of un-nuanced bickering beneath Todd VanDerWerff’s reviews and across the Internet at large. . . . There’s no such thing as “talking about Community”—you’re either contributing to the hype or trying to burn the thing down.

Well, if you’re looking for un-nuanced bickering across the internet, you’ve come to the right place.

Actually, you can talk specifically about what works and what doesn’t about Community.  You’re basically enforcing a bizarre hivemind on everyone, where if anyone disagrees with Todd they’re just trying to “burn the thing down.”  And it was Todd who was trying to “salt the ground” of Community.

It’s great to be connected to people through shared interests, but what happened to Arrested Development while it was away was something different, and something distinct to the Internet age: A complicated, death-defying high-wire act of a television show was distilled down to a few easily identifiable tricks (or “illusions,” in the sense that repeating the show’s punchlines gives off the illusion of creativity—something I’m certainly guilty of).

Yeah, cause really caring about a comedy and quoting lines from it to your friends is something distinct to “the Internet age.”  When were you fucking born, Erik? 1994?  Ever heard of the proverbial “water cooler,” where we’re all supposed to gather and swap our favorite lines of Seinfeld the day after?  I grew up before the Internet, and everyone was “repeating show’s punchlines.”  Ascribing things to the “Internet age” is the laziest crutch you can possibly lean on. 

It’s the GIF-ification of the sitcom, and the contributing factor to my greatest fear about the new episodes: That, rather than continuing and improving upon the derring-do of Original Flavor Arrested Development, the Netflix episodes will be one long parade of fan service, a constant pat on the back for remembering jokes the Internet wouldn’t let me forget.

Oh you did not just use the phrase “derring-do.” I don’t know whether that or “GIF-ification” makes me less able to keep down my goat’s milk.

Remember the “Abed-ization” of Community?  Neologisms don’t make you smart—just lazy. 

And “fan service” is an AV Club term that means nothing.  You act like any callbacks to previous jokes or previous episodes is just pandering.  Yet everyone at the AV Club is all gung-ho about serialized seasons and knitting episodes together over the season.  What gives?  It’s like you think humor is “fan service,” some lower level of evolution.

Even Josh Modell, your interlocutor, similarly disagrees, though in a more restrained, less profane manner:

I really can’t imagine it being all “fan service” jokes—I’m sure there will be plenty, but you have to keep in mind that that’s an inaccurate description anyway.

I have to disagree a bit that season four of Arrested Development should be treated as a new show, though.

After Josh’s reasonableness, how does Erik respond?  Well he starts by comparing the potential new season of Arrested Development to The Phantom Menace (!), (seriously, I can’t make this shit up) another anticipated return to a beloved pop culture phenomena.  His conclusion:

The dead and the canceled should remain that way, the logic goes, so that the rest of us can carry on—and maybe make or discover something great that isn’t predicated on a known quantity.

How does this follow?  Just cause the Phantom Menace sucked should we deny Arrested Development the chance at resurrection?  So what if it winds up being bad?  We can just go back and watch the original episodes, just like the original Star Wars movies.  What the fuck is so wrong about being excited?