Recently, I’ve grown exhausted “defending” the new season of Arrested Development. Sure, the show has always been an acquired taste that will confuse the New Girl-crowd and fully alienate most of the people that think The Big Bang Theory is a hoot and a holler. [This is a really smart show about mostly wacky people made for a smart audience, as opposed to TBBT being a dumb show about smart people.] So it’s only natural that the latest Development season won’t be for everyone.
The problem? The people I’m defending the show against aren’t people who never liked it. Those people are too busy enjoying Kardashians or Duck Dynasty or re-runs of Friends to even know Arrested Development is back and on Netflix. No, the people I’m arguing with are (supposedly) “fans” of the show.
They claim they love the show but flat-out hate the new season. They might say “It’s terrible, but I loved the first three seasons” or a more emotional “I hated it!” or my personal favorite “I watched 15 minutes and stopped.” Really? A true fan who’s missed this show for nearly a decade would watch less than one full episode and then stop? Hell no! A real fan would want to devour these episodes from start to finish, and would love the overlapping inside jokes that keep building with each new episode.
The real problem? The “cult” of Arrested Development has grown quite large in the eight years it’s been off Fox. It’s grown to include many, many people that never watched the show when it was on the air, some that never even heard of it, and some that only “love” it because it’s become quite trendy to use it as a prime example of “a show I ‘loved’ but it was fucking cancelled!” The only thing people love more than pop culture is complaining about pop culture. And there are an awful lot of people that have never been hip to anything in their life that have jumped onto the clever bandwagon of folks who always list “Arrested Development” as a prime example of a show that “was awesome” but gone too soon.
The show has now been mythologized so much by people that never actually watched the episodes when they were coming out every week that these new episodes wouldn’t have “delivered” if they had been sent down from Mount Olympus by Zeus himself. These are the fans who don’t watch a show when it’s on the air, then complain relentlessly when it’s cancelled, and then shit on it when it comes back. Wouldn’t they be happy if they were getting any extension of life of their “favorite” show? Something is better than nothing, right? Well, if you’re a true fan it sure is. Too bad there’s not more of us around.