Have you watched yet?!
My guess it you feel into one of these groups:
1) You’ve ignored it, ’cause you’re not that into Arrested Development.
2) You’ve already ingested all the episodes (maybe even twice or three times by now), blogged about it, tweeted, and on and on.
At this point you may not need to talk about it more here. Nonetheless, here we are talking about it.
I knew I’d want to watch it with people, but I didn’t know anyone who was having a party starting at midnight. And come on. When the show comes out at midnight, how can you not binge marathon it all at once?
(Plus, I signed up for Netflix an hour before the season started. I wanted to make sure that not only did I view it at a party, but I streamed it myself. I want it to have as many views as possible.)
So, I pre-watched the entire season at midnight, knowing I was going over to someone’s house at 11am the next day.
I used to be a little against the two-screen viewing experience, because you need to actually pay attention to what’s happening onscreen (especially with Arrested Development). However, I really enjoy live tweeting (which I personally did not do for this show), and I love the community feeling (even if it is an online community) during big TV event stuff like this.
So, I would pay lots of attention, but then sneak on to twitter for a bit and see what people were saying.
First, my reaction. I thought this season was incredibly well put together. It’s basically a masterpiece. The episodes are woven in so well. The details mattered and were well tracked. I truly hope Arrested Development comes back in some form so we can continue to see where this goes.
Toward episode 11 (I won’t give any real spoilers), the episodes got even better as everything really started coming together. I actually gasped a couple of times. There also were some incredibly hilarious laugh-out-loud moments throughout the episodes.
I give the season a big thumbs up. I watched basically straight through starting at midnight taking little breaks to grab food, use the bathroom, etc. I finished somewhere around 9:15am.
Then I did a little reading to find out some general internet reactions, and got ready to go to a party to watch it all over again!
But going back to that internet reaction, here’s my reaction to the reaction:
For one thing, I read a lot of complaints from people about episodes mainly focusing on one character throughout, instead of bouncing around between more interconnected storylines.
If people choose not to like that kind of storytelling, okay, fine. But please, people. Why are we acting like it’s a surprise? It’s not like that plan was mentioned in Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, or The New York Times, or anything.
I actually liked this form of storytelling – knowing that it was all part of a bigger story. (As I said, I loved the reveals.)
Another thing that really disappointed me in the reactions was that even though every actor on that show has aged 7 years, Portia de Rossi’s face was talked about a lot. A lot, a lot. And I barely heard a peep about any of the male faces on the show.
Sigh. That’s how we treat women in our culture. And it’s disappointing…
Speaking of disappointing, it was actually a suggestion when searching twitter for “Arrested Development” to search for “Arrested Development disappointed.”
Opinions are great. Sounding off is fine. (I certainly sound off on my opinions on this blog.) But I think there maybe needs to come a point sometimes where we are just thankful for things! This show came back after being off the air for 7 years. It was an incredible uphill battle, and yet a bunch of powers that be made it happen for us.
And as a collective group, all we could do in the hours that followed was say how disappointed we were in an incredibly well-crafted show?
To each their own, I suppose. I loved it. After marathoning it, I loved going to a party to marathon it again. I also loved interacting with people on twitter. Whether the masses love it or hate it, I’m happy taking great joy in it.
Did you all watch it? What did you think?