AN ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT
by Daren Foster

There’s a quote, probably apocryphal, about the Velvet Underground. Actually, a quick search on the interwebs gives attribution to Brian Eno so it may very well be true but who doesn’t love to use the phrase, “probably apocryphal” whenever the opportunity presents itself?

Apparently Eno once said, more or less, that only a thousand people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album but everyone who did went on to form a band. The statement resurfaced twenty years later with The Pixies, backed up by superstar Kurt Cobain’s admission that Smells Like Teen Spirit was simply a rip-off of The Pixies’ sound. (Carefully accredited to a 1994 Rolling Stone interview therefore not at all apocryphal.)

Point is, influence is not always directly proportional to popularity. So it was with Arrested Development, the late, lamented sitcom not the late-80s/mid-90s hip hop group although I can absolutely see why you might’ve headed in that direction given the previous musical references. Running for 53 episodes from 2003 to 2006, Arrested Development garnered a boatful of awards and nominations, universally fawning critical reaction and ho-humdrum audience numbers. If you’re looking to find a recipe for ‘cult status’, those three factors are the main ingredients. Throw in the huge growth of television DVD sales and the show’s status couldn’t be any cultier.

Arrested Development’s post-broadcast life is an important fact to consider here. From the get-go, it was obvious that the network’s confines couldn’t accommodate the show. It up-ended and undercut so many of the traditional sitcom conventions that it was unrecognizable as part of the genre by both TV executives and a majority of viewers (while I suspect the numbers of the latter group were greatly amplified and ultimately promoted by the former to justify their own unease with the show). Not all that long ago, a television series’ quick demise would relegate it to the dustbin of history where it was forgotten to all but the hardiest, most annoying of trivia buffs. Now however, if a show acquires a second life on the DVD racks, it can live on, haunting and mocking those who killed it while, ironically, making those same folks a lot of additional money. One of those win-win, win-lose, lose-win situations that crop up whenever you mix art and commerce.

The sitcom has been referred to as commercial broadcasting’s perfect product; a “Miracle Play of consumer society.” Descending from the serials that helped catapult radio into a national obsession, sitcoms were carefully designed to generate a congenial feeling of goodwill and familiarity with audiences in the hopes of making them more open to purchasing the sponsors’ products. Unlike their hard-hitting dramatic brethren, sitcoms depicted life as advertisers and corporate executives believed the public longed for, not how it truly was. This rosy view of American society was supposed to make viewers more affable consumers.With network television still firmly in the iron grip of advertisers, the sitcom format has changed surprisingly little over the last sixty years or so. While content has evolved along with society’s sensibilities, albeit always a few timid steps behind, technically and structurally, there’s not a whole lot of variance between today’s Two and Half Men and The Odd Couple from nearly 30 years ago. The success of I Love Lucy’s 3-camera filming technique in front of an audience jettisoned the then standard practice of live-to-air broadcasts, especially once CBS realized they could make more money when they reran episodes. Aside from moving from film to videotape, the practice pretty much remains in place to this day. Through peaks and valleys of popularity, the sitcom has maintained the same basic structural blueprint over the course of its lifespan.

The occasional deviant has popped up here and there. The Honeymooners springs immediately to mind. Some twenty years after that, there was All in the Family. The Simpsons animated the proceedings and in the process shook the foundations of the smug Father Knows Best complacency of The Cosby Show. All these, however, were merely content adaptations that did almost nothing to alter the sitcom DNA.

Not so, Arrested Development. It picked up, slapped around and swallowed the genre whole before spitting the thing back out in unrecognizable, semi-digested pieces. It went where other sitcoms feared to tread. It screwed with chronology, jumping back and forth in time, in real time, as thoughts entered the characters’ heads. Forget about those corny flashback set pieces introduced and exited with wavy bands of colour. Dispensing with the traditional 3-camera set-up, Arrested Development internalized the mockumentary style camera (used to great effect by the British The Office but long since passed its due date), employing a subtle cinema vérité flare that insinuated itself into the belly of the Bluth family beast. The omnipresent narrator (voiced by series producer, Ron Howard) pushed the proceedings along, pointing out lies the on-screen characters told, picking fights with other narrators and apologizing to Andy Griffiths for a slight the show may have served toward him. The show called back jokes not only from earlier in the same episode but earlier in the season, even reaching back a few times to previous seasons. It joked about its own tenuous future. It was smart, relentless, unsentimental, demanding, jaded and despite irony being declared dead in 2001, Arrested Development was drenched in the stuff. It was defiantly but undeniably brilliant.

And then it was dead.

In its wake, almost every other sitcom now seems quaint and dated, remnants of some bygone era. Mr. Charlie Sheen let me introduce you to Ms. Lucille Ball. They creak with stock characters and sag under the weight of shop-worn plots and premises. Some tenuously dip their toes into the waters that Arrested Development gleefully plunged. To some success but little notice the recent strike filler, Miss Guided adopted the single-camera format, quick cut time jumping, and even one of the stars of Arrested Development. 30 Rock, probably the closest in style, tone and funniness sits mired in 4th place in its time slot, critically loved but woefully unwatched. Conventional television, it seems, has moved on without so much of an appreciative wave goodbye.

Arrested Development is so influential because it tossed a bucket of cold, refreshing water on a baleful industry that, like an Arctic ice sheet, is melting precipitously before our very eyes. Ding dong, the witch is almost dead, I say. The wicked witch is dead.

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