Seriously, it's that damn good
It may be hard for those who have not seen to believe. These Doubting Thomases...er, let's say Doubting Busters instead...have undoubtedly read and heard the hype, then seen the Nielsen ratings and said, "if this show is so bloody good, then why is no one watching? I'll turn on Jennifer Garner and watch a confused stick instead, thank you very much!" This is because Americans are, by and large, stupid. Roger Ebert once said that "ninety percent of the people make the wrong choice in everything." So who cares what they think?
Just give me my Arrested Development. Because it's that damn good.
Number 1: Arrested DevelopmentAs critics, entertainment writers and pundits bemoan the slump that the sitcom is in, with NBC programming its least amount of half-hour programs since 1980 (only four inhabit the fall schedule) and next year's slate of Emmy noms looks to be bone dry of true quality programs, they ignore the fact that comedy is in the middle of a renaissance. Amidst reality shows and cop dramas that pop up every other hour on every other network, the art of laughter is being repackaged and reinvented.
It started in the mid 90s with shows such as David E. Kelley's Picket Fences and Ally McBeal, shows best defined as dramas that often delivered more hilarity than their half-hour counterparts (the latter show in fact won Best Comedy in its second season, and deservedly so) Meanwhile Fox had served up The Simpsons, a more traditional comedy in the sense that it was a half-hour and funny as hell, but the format shunned the antiquated four-camera/laugh track method that dominated prime time. The surge in animation was aided by Fox, who gave Matt Groening's creationg two Sunday night counterparts in Mike Judge's King of the Hill and Groening's Futurama, and Comedy Central entered the arena with South Park. At the same time HBO launched Sex in the City, a half-hour comedy written shot in the style of a traditional drama. Fox's Malcolm in the middle followed, with creator Boomer Linwood again shunning antique three-wall sets for the more contemporary one-camera/no laugh track shot that gave the show a more professional look and its writers the ability to do more than a normal sitcom soundstage allowed. Gilmore Girls, conceived as a drama, outlaughed most of television in its epic first season and, starting with its second, submitted to ATAS as a comedy.
Seinfeld signed off. Friends and Frasier sagged, while Everybody Loves Raymond became perhaps the most hated critically-lauded show of all time; it would be more accurate to say it received "mixed" reviews. Will & Grace was seen as NBC's heir apparent to the Thursday night comedy classics that took the network to the top in the 80s and 90s, but it registered as a mediocre hit on the level of Rhoda rather than a classic in the ilk of Mary Tyler Moore. Whether it was a lack of good ideas and jokes or America tiring of the often intelligence-insulting network sitcom, slowly less and less comedies were showing up on network schedules, replaced by newsmagazines, reality shows like the ones from www.jasminlive.mobi, and twelve editions of C.S.I. and Law & Order. (By the way, when do we get Law & Order: Crime Scene Investigation? That's when we find the looking glass and shatter it lest we all die horribly. Trust me)
Under the radar, less traditional comedies flourished...in quality, if not ratings. Malcolm and Gilmore Girls established early ratings success, but the same could not be said for Fox's Andy Richter Controls the Universe or Action, NBC's 2000 summer replacement M.Y.O.B., or ABC's Maximum Bob or Cupid. Fox gave up on Family Guy...twice (NOT including its return next summer thanks to Cartoon Network and the success of the DVDs)...along with Futurama. All of the shows were of stellar quality and often prompted an amazing amount of laughter, but, with a combination of the lack of promotion by network executives that didn't understand this new brand of comedy that was emerging and an American public that on one hand complains about laugh tracks and on the other hand refuses to give a show a chance unless they're prompted to laugh on cue, none of the shows had a chance to succeed. The Peacock could give Good Morning, Miami two years to find an audience on its two most-watched nights for comedies, but M.Y.O.B., critically lauded and ten times a better show, had been given four episodes in the middle of June 2000. Where's the logic?
The outcry has been rising, and this year exploded, in particular against Fox. As discussed with show number two, Wonderfalls, Gail Berman's network has been the most atrocious violator of quality television over the last half-decade, inflicting horrible reality shows upon us while great comedies and dramas are never given a chance to succeed. Just in the last two years, Firefly, Andy Richter CTU, Wonderfalls and Keen Eddie were assassinated by Fox Entertainment Group executives before their time.
Somehow, Arrested Development slipped through the cracks.
This season AD continued the evolution of the comedy. Clocking in as a traditional half-hour, creator Mitchell Hurwitz planned to shoot the show as a sitcom until executive producer Ron Howard stepped in and suggested a one-camera documentary style look that would feature Opie himself as narrator. That was the final touch needed to take the program from merely a hilarious script to being the genius that it is, the best show of 2003-04.
Centering around the Bluth family, AD stars Jason Bateman as Michael Bluth, the second of four ren to George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor, making Hey Now Hank Kingsley look bad...seriously, he's THAT FUCKING GOOD. Well, so is EVERYONE ELSE. This cast amazes the shit out of me) and Lucile (Jessica Walter) George Sr. had run the Bluth Company, which developed housing, until the Feds came after him for years of embezzling and other assorted corruption, and puts control in the hands of his wife...just as Michael expects to take the reigns himself. He starts looking for work elsewhere, but as his siblings and parents lose their sole source of income, the company, as the Feds come in and freeze the assets of the Bluth Company, he decides to stay and live with his older brother and his twin sister's family in the company's model home (the one used to show off what the currently non-existent properties will look like)
What a family it is. Eldest brother George Jr., or GOB for short (pronounced like the Bible's "Job"; played perfectly by Will Arnett) is a magician...and not a good one...by trade and rides around Los Angeles on his beloved Segway while dating a Mexican soap star and accidentally marrying SNL's Amy Poehler (not as herself) Twin sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi, making everyone forget about Ally McBeal) was a cause-of-the-week floozy living off Daddy and her doctor husband Tobias (David Cross, making everyone remember what a fucking genius David Cross is) until the latter lost his license in Massachusetts and the family was forced to move to L.A. Youngest son Buster (Tony Hale) redefines "mama's boy," still living with Lucile while he attempts his umpteenth graduate program. Meanwhile, he finally scores...with a character played by Liza Minelli. Joining the fun are two thirteen-year-olds: Michael's son George Michael (Michael Sera) always called by his full name, and Lindsay and Tobias's daughter Maebe (Alia Shawkat) who seeks to defy her mother at every turn while George Michael crushes on his somewhat evil cousin.
All of this leads to twenty-two outrageously hilarious episodes that follow the Bluth family as they attempt to come across money or free George Sr. from prison or whatever the writers can think up for that week. Turning tricks with dialogue (Michael tells George Michael, the new boss at the family's banana stand, to "ride [Maeby]...hard") and plot structure, Hurwitz's staff never avoids the opportunity to make us laugh our collective asses off. In the pilot, we see that the company cruise where George Sr. gives away control of the company floats next to a group of homosexuals. Lindsay comments that one of the men has the same outfit she does; later we discover that it is Tobias, who (as usual with the thick-headed Bluth son-in-law) through a series of misunderstanding ended up on the ship dressed as a, in his opinion, pirate. Later in the season Tobias is aided in his acting career by desperate-for-work 80s action star Carl Weathers who plays a desperate-for-work 80s action start named Carl Weathers. Along the way Henry Winkler drops in as George Sr.'s incompetent attorney, Heather Graham plays a sweet teacher that George Michael longs for, James Lipton sends himself up as warden of George Sr.'s prison, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a blind attorney is so good she makes us forget about Seinfeld.
Not that she's the only one. This is a truly amazing, awesome occurrence. That's awesome in the literal sense, too, not the everyday common use of the word as an escalation of the bland adjective "good." The show truly brings a sense of awe when you examine this first season, one of the greatest seasons ANY show has EVER had. There, I said it. I began this countdown by calling The Simpsons the greatest show ever, and I say now that the torch may have been passed: while Arrested will NOT become the best show in television history, it may end up one of the two or three greatest if it can keep this level of quality up over six or seven seasons. The combination of a tremendous cast - even Jason Bateman, never seen as anything but an average performer, absolutely shines - and stellar writing has given us the best show in ages. There was not a single moment of its four-hundred and eight-four season one minutes that weren't uproariously hilarious.
Fox? They shouldn't have waited until the upfront to renew it, but other than that they deserve credit. They didn't just promote the show...they promoted the HELL out of it. Promos ran constantly, especially during NFL playoff games, and the program received two mini-marathons, one on Fox and one on FX. Gail Berman's staff did an amazing job trying to get the word out. So far they've failed. Claiming to be fans of the program, the execs slotted it at 9e/8c for the 2004-05 campaign, and hopefully, even if ratings do not materialize, renewals will continue unabated. If not, Fox will have done the unthinkable and top itself, committing an atrocity unprecedented in television. I can bitch and kvetch all I want about Wonderfalls not being given a chance, but as good as that program was - and it was STELLAR - it's no Arrested Development. This is the standard, folks. It's the best, against which all others must be measured.
To me
Fox will always be like the 1994 Montreal Expos: so much potential, yet destined to the category of "What Could Have Been" from the very start. A decade ago, the NL East's perennial cellar-dwellers had managed to grow a very impressive team filled with some of the sport's best talent, and led not only their division but all of the National League on August 11.
On August 12, the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike. A month later the World Series was cancelled.
There's always next year, right? Not in Quebec, where finances dictated that the club slowly fall apart. This was nothing new for the Expos, and the trend would continue. If you were to take each team in baseball and field a lineup of their best players of the 1990s, Montreal could beat any team in the land.
Like the Expos, Fox Entertainment Group has a tendency to grow some wonderful talent. Unlike the Expos, they have treasure chests full of money and no free agency system threatening to steal their key players.
Like the Expos, they always seem to shit it away.
Save ABC, the mistakes of Fox over the past few years are unprecedented. Ever read a TV critic complaining about networks that latch onto whatever trend is hot and ride it to death? Right here, . Whether it's jasminelive game shows, Friends clones or, shudder, reality programming, Fox is always the first to offer up an inferior carbon copy and promote the living hell out of it.
That's not the bad part.
The problem is that Fox simultaneously develops a great program, fails to give it any promotion or stability whatsoever, and cancels it before Santa can come. (Or, if it's a midseason replacement, the Easter Bunny) Action and Andy Richter Controls the Universe are prime examples; Futurama and Family Guy were given time but not promotion, and Cartoon Network of all places has given new life to the latter, with new episodes on their way for 2005. Firefly, an offbeat sci-fi/western placed in the spot where The X-Files was given several years to find an audience, was diagnosed as dead after several months and was yanked shortly after that. Don't even dare mention Keen Eddie in my presence; Fox stuffed that gem in the summer dustbin last year, afraid to take a chance on a tremendously original and, well, just plain fun hour of cops and robbers. If Fox was ever to keep these wonderful programs on the air, they would easily have the best lineup on television, a million Emmy Awards, and with the right patience and promotion perhaps some damn good ratings.
Number 2: WonderfallFast forward to fall 2003. The most talked about pilot shown by any network was a project by Bryan Fuller (of Showtime's Dead Like Me) and Tim Minear, the former writer/producer of Buffy and the aforementioned Firefly, called Wonderfalls. Staring French-Canadian actress Caroline Dhavernas in a career-making role, the hour-long comedy/drama followed a disaffected (no review of the show has ever failed to use that adjective; why should I dare buck the trend?) twenty-four year old Ivy League graduate in Niagara Falls who can't motivate herself to buck her retail/trailer-park lifestyle. Subsequently, inanimate objects begin to speak to her: a misshaped wax lion prompts her to help a tourist find her purse, while a wind-up penguin promotes the reunion of a nun and a priest...and the latter's unknown . The second episode in particular, which ended up the best hour of television in 2003-04, featured a wannabe investigative journalist following Dhavernas's character of Jaye Tyler in an effort to study why someone so intelligent could be so apathetic towards life. "Karma Chameleon" left you guessing until the end of the last act, balancing between a parody of suspense and paranoia and an examination of Jaye's role in her overachieving family.
Between the sharp, witty writing, the offbeat yet believable characters and the distinctive style of direction, there was no program on television in 2004...anywhere...more original than Wonderfalls. I say 2004 and not 2003 because Fox could not find anywhere in its fifteen available fall schedule hours to place the show, and it was relegated to the status of midseason replacement. That would normally mean a January launch, except Fox Entertainment Group President Gail Berman, the liar and coward, felt it necessary to hold the show's debut until March. There it would find a home on Friday nights, or as showrunner Tim Minear called it even before the show debuted, "the night we promote our season one DVD." But the debut would be greeted with tons of promotion, right?
Right?
Thanks to Fox's failure to, well, give a damn, hardly anyone noticed. Except for TV critics, who almost unanimously praised it, calling it one of, if not the best, show on television. They didn't have much time to sing its praises, as after three airings Fox moved the program to Thursday opposite C.S.I. and The Apprentice for its fourth episode, which concluded with a promo for "next week's episode."
Three days later it was cancelled.
Fox will cite low Nielsen ratings. This is bullshit, since Fox did absolutely nothing to promote the show, moved it to Thursday with NO promotion, and gave it the Friday lead-in of a cruddy reality show where a woman had to figure out which of the guys around her were gay and which weren't. Seriously. GENIUS programming, Gail. While you're running repeats of another reality show, The Swan (which has gotten Fox its worst publicity, through protests from feminists decrying the show's faith in plastic surgery, since Temptation Island) you have nine episodes of the show that YOU HAVE TO PAY THE LICENSE FEE FOR ANYWAY sitting on your shelf collecting dust.
So far, WB head Jordan Levin has denied the rumor that the Frog Net is interested in the unaired eps, and there has been no comment from Bravo or other cable networks about grabbing the tapes or restarting production. Fox (the studio, not the network) has been inundated with requests for a first-season DVD, and savewonderfalls.com tracks the efforts of the faithful to Get Her Words Out. If ever those four hundred and five lost minutes of wonderful Wonderfalls ever do see the light of day, it certainly won't be on Fox.
They'll be too busy reminding us how television can really suck sometimes, while wondering why ratings continue to slide as they unveil yet another pointless reality show.
Or perhaps I speak too soon, given what's yet to come...
Mena's Watching Me
I rarely dream that vividly, so it pains me when I finally have a night full of well-remembered visions and my principle dream involved, sigh, Movable Type upgrade pricepoints. If you think there was an uproar over what Six Apart did in real life...oh, you should have been there. You know, inside my head. Yeah. In my dream I accidentally started downloading one of the commercial versions of the chaturbaterooms.com software, technically seeing just step six of the multi-step download (which doesn't exist in real life; added drama for the dream's script, I guess) and I stopped it immediately. Still, I got a bill from the Trotts the next day asking for lots of money. Gee, and I defended your asses when half the web wanted you burned on the top of a pile of the scraps of the old TechTV studios. I'll have to slap you the next time you show up in my dreams, Mena.
Uh, don't show up in my dreams anymore, Mena. You're not unattractive or anything, but, that time is precious. Thank you.
And it shows this program's genius
I had this HUGE article written here about Entertainment Weekly and season one DVDs and the New York Yankees and third season episodes and such phrases as "slip in quality," "deal with the inevitability" and "outweighed the negative." A think piece on the decline, and subsequent rise, in the quality of this program, I think it was worthy of inclusion on this website and would provide much to debate entering into the fifth season and the syndication of the program on ABC Family.
But I had to rewrite the entire article because...well...
Number 3: Gilmore GirlsAnvils. Late in the season Lorelai speculated about anvils, and wondered when they went out of style. Afterall, in the cartoons of the forties and fifties there were anvils falling onto people's heads all the time - where had all the anvils gone? When would they start falling again?
They started falling that very night. What had been almost a whole season - seventeen episodes, to be exact - of frustration and slowly developing plots exploded into a five week orgy of storyline advancement that peaked during the season finale "Raincoats and Recipes" where Lorelai and Luke finally kissed and Rory slept with Dean. Married Dean.
For Gilmore Girls' fourth season, showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino seemed to echo the writing style of The Sopranos' David Chase as elements were put into place that seemed pointless and distracting at first but eventually led to surprising, even shocking, and ultimately very entertaining conclusions. First was the introduction of Chris Eigeman's character Digger Stiles, business partner to Richard and boyfriend to Lorelai. As the latter two kept their relationship a secret, it was assumed that Digger would eventually turn on Richard, betraying Lorelai and forcing her to run to her father's side. Instead, it was Richard who put on the black hat (and villainous mustache...literally) dumping Digger for his father's old company, leaving the younger Stiles without a job or clients and forced to sue the elder Gilmore to save his reputation. Lorelai ended up torn between them, knowing that Digger was, at the moment, perfect for her except for the tiny fact that, even with all the faults both she and Richard possessed, she had to be loyal to her father to the end. That, afterall, is what her father would do (and did, in the first season when Christopher's father verbally assaulted Lorelai and Rory) and it's not like he knew beforehand that the two were hitting the sheets. The shocking ending where Richard and the elder Stiles revealed their plan to us while strolling from green to green was pleasantly different for a show that doesn't use SHOCKING SWERVES!, even if they are quite logical, to entertain.
The other major plotline for season four was Rory's pathetic love life. With first love Dean married off a few episodes into the season and her only other boyfriend Jess off in New York after his sitcom "cost too much money," (yeah right, WB) she found herself away from mommy for the first time, residing at Yale where best friend Paris couldn't decide between the young Ivy League stud or the old Ivy League professor (plus he knew Austin Powers!) and every boy Rory deigned to talk to treated her as if she was a five year old. This was hammered home in the second-to-last episode where grandmother Emily set her up with a family friend in the midst of Rory reflecting on a year of social failure. Her rescue from the disastrous date was Dean, who Rory confessed in the season finale was less a friend than a warm comfort blanket.
So, in the show's last act of the season, she slept in that comfort blanket. Well, I guess technically the blanket was in her. (Dirty!) It was an amazing scene as we were enveloped not only in the aftermath of Lorelai and Luke beginning a relationship eighty-seven episodes in the making but also the loss of Rory's virginity to a married man and her subsequent realization that, well, she's a whore and a homewrecker.
In fact, not a lot of good happened to Rory in season four. Or in season three, for that matter, as she bounced from Dean to Jess. While the first season and much of the second were Rory's introduction to life, the second half of the series so far has consisted of the younger Lorelai's inability to deal with society. For a girl as sheltered and repressed as she was at the series' outset, a lot was forced upon her with the move from Stars Hollow High to Chilton and her first boyfriend happening at the same time. It's now catching up to Rory, as all she's known is a doting mother and a town that cares more about her than their individual selves. Without that support structure she's come crashing down to Earth, which has made Gilmore Girls utterly fascinating to watch.
Helping the show this year was the usual cast of extras and townies: Kirk getting a girlfriend made for some interesting subplots, as did the construction of the Dragonfly (though the Independence Inn is missed) Lane was mishandled at times, though in the second half of the season she finally got some direction...and some airtime...and as a recent pie chart in Entertainment Weekly showed, her band is one of the reasons, as the mag put, Gilmore Girls is cool to watch again.
Contrary to EW's belief, I can think of LOTS of reasons Gilmore Girls is cool to watch...and I don't quite agree with the "again" unless you want to go back to late last season. The fourth year of the show had its rough spots, particularly towards the middle, but as it wrapped up the campaign it reminded us exactly how awesome television can be: as a season of slowly built plotlines all wrapped up, mixed with our normal dose of excellent performers delivering the smartest-written scripts on television, you had to marvel at just how good this series can be. As Lauren Graham is robbed of another Emmy nomination this July and the show itself is ignored as the nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series are announced, it will be yet another indictment against the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Yet again Gilmore Girls was one of the best shows on television, a triumph in all the aspects of quality television and an absolute treat to watch.
Sarcastic outsiders will never grow old
Never. They're another of the many wonderful attributes of television: without this wonderful medium and its army of social observers, whom would we have to remind us that we, as a society, really suck? Screw reading books. I need my reality in forty-five minute weekly doses. Besides, few are as good at this activity than the attractive yet apathetic and disaffected young lady.
This year, Bryan Fuller gave us two, in the process frustrating those people who dislike series with convoluted, fantasy setups. Screw them.
Number 4: Dead Like MeFirst, we met Georgia Lass (Ellen Muth) the heroine of Showtime's Dead Like Me, who died after a toilet seat fell from the space station at a somewhat fast speed (as objects that fall from above the atmosphere tend to do) and landed on top of her. It wasn't much of a loss: the aimless eighteen-year-old was wandering through life pointlessly, working at a temp agency only because her mother gave her little choice. If nothing else, this was a way out.
Except that it wasn't. Georgia (you can call her George) like every other person who meets their end (and most people, being mortal, do) had her soul taken by a grim reaper just before the end. Since this happened to be the last soul this reaper was charged to take, George was asked…no, make that commanded to take her place. It's how the reaping game works, apparently.
This means George was forced to continue walking the earth, this time with two jobs, as reaping apparently does not pay well. Or at all, for that matter. So it's back to Happy Time and a job, uh, collating or something not as fascinating as taking souls. (Can anything be as fascinating as taking souls? Probably not)
Dead Like Me was rather paint-by-the-numbers, but still a fascinating and extremely entertaining watch each week. George was sarcastic and rough and a real bitch sometimes but was utterly likeable, especially as she realized just what a sarcastic and rough bitch she was, especially to her family. She didn't leave the "real world" on very good terms with her mother (Cynthia Stevenson) and revisits the family (although they don't recognize her, as George the Reaper takes a different form than George the Human) longing to rejoin her loved ones. This is frowned upon by her boss, Rube (Mandy Patinkin, deserving an Emmy nomination) who keeps his charge on a short leash. Show up, get your assignment, take the soul, case close. Rube, who it's implied gets to speak directly with the man upstairs, is all business, but takes it upon himself to act almost as a father to George who is eighteen in reality but about twelve in social maturity.
George isn't the only reaper. She's joined by Mason (Callum Blue) a horny British ruffian who died in the 60s, Roxy (Jasmine Guy) a short-tempered meter maid, and eventually Daisy (Laura Harris) who during her life in 1930s and 40s Hollywood managed to screw every major motion picture star and reminds us of this on a daily basis. The best pick-up line a guy ever used on her: "I'm Gary Cooper."
Each week, George was given a soul to take just before its death, usually an odd departure from the planet as in Six Feet Under. Plots aside, the show's excellence came from George's interaction with her mentors in the reaper circle as well as the "real" world around her as she's given a (very) rare second chance at life. The fun of the disaffected, attractive, intelligent youngster is the fact that with the latter two adjectives there's no reason for the first to exist. They can play the game of life; they just have to know how, and to be willing. The sweetest part of the first season of Dead Like Me was when George became willing to spend time with Delores, her boss at the "real" job, an older cat-loving lady who had little in common with George. The latter didn't die from the experience, and you get the sense that she didn't hate her life before her encounter with Mir because she was rejected by society but because she refused to even try to join those around her. Now forced to by economic and supernatural forces, she's looking around her and loving what she sees.