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Jan. 7th, 2014 03:22 pmBeen watching Arrested Development rather than those movies. Skipped the first few on the assumption that if I hadn't liked them during the last two or three tries I wouldn't now.
It started making me laugh more than once every five episodes only in season 3. But I think I at least see the appeal now - it isn't about the laughs. The show's loved because there's a lot to notice, little of which holds up to thought or scrutiny but the pace of the show prevents that anyway. It's just consistently vaguely enlivening, with nonstop low-level wordplay, pointless self-reference, safe-feeling cruelty and easy, noncommittal left-wing satire. It's silly, and I think the second I stopped hating it was when I realized that that's what people like about it. It's talked about like it's more, tries sometimes to sound like more, but that's all to make people feel they have a right to embrace pure silliness.
Related to which I suspect people who came to it during the early Bush years will always like it more. We all found thumbs to suck back then and I see how this would have been a good one for many.
And the cast is genuinely appealing. It's a shame they were rarely given a chance to be genuinely funny, rather than just act like funny was raining all over. But they amuse in these roles, they're likable. I now understand the phenomenon of Michael Cera movies, even - clearly that guy's been coasting on earned goodwill for the incest storyline for a decade now.
Archer is clearly the show's heir, though I can't get through an episode unhigh. Even then I think I only laughed at the Danger Zone thing, and felt immediately embarrassed I had - one of those somehow genius strokes of stupid.
I think what I still might be missing is what people get out of comic characters who are terrible people - sans good jokes, anyway. I can tolerate them but I think they genuinely relax a lot of people, permit judgment to be turned off because everyone's obviously hellbound or something. Or is it something about safety, how an environment's created where people threatening and risking great harm never produce true suffering? I guess what I'm a bit off on is what the comedic amounts to minus jokes, or at least certain versions of it.
I hate feeling hard to please but I find funny everything else I'm demographically obliged to find funny - love Community, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, Seinfeld, Fawlty Towers, early Simpsons and Futurama, the good parts of Gervais shows, the middle seasons of Parks and Recreation etc. But those are all genuinely clever. Arrested Development and Archer are like how those shows would be if you subtracted every laugh, left only the connecting tissue of busy-ness expressing a constant "funny things are going to happen shortly" conviction. Which is a strange effect, and one you can get oddly used to. I guess the various unexcellent bits of excellent shows earn your love too, over time, just because you've put that time in? Presumably love for a person works similarly.
Not that I now love Arrested Development, but unwatchable somehow became fairly watchable. Maybe I was laughing toward the end not because the writing had improved but because I'd just stopped resisting something?
Haven't tried the relaunch yet. Part of what inspired this viewing was the lukewarm reception of the new season - episodes longtime fans hadn't liked might be ones I would, I reasoned.
That and the fact that the show's the alleged best in its category. People sure were right about The Wire, after all.
It started making me laugh more than once every five episodes only in season 3. But I think I at least see the appeal now - it isn't about the laughs. The show's loved because there's a lot to notice, little of which holds up to thought or scrutiny but the pace of the show prevents that anyway. It's just consistently vaguely enlivening, with nonstop low-level wordplay, pointless self-reference, safe-feeling cruelty and easy, noncommittal left-wing satire. It's silly, and I think the second I stopped hating it was when I realized that that's what people like about it. It's talked about like it's more, tries sometimes to sound like more, but that's all to make people feel they have a right to embrace pure silliness.
Related to which I suspect people who came to it during the early Bush years will always like it more. We all found thumbs to suck back then and I see how this would have been a good one for many.
And the cast is genuinely appealing. It's a shame they were rarely given a chance to be genuinely funny, rather than just act like funny was raining all over. But they amuse in these roles, they're likable. I now understand the phenomenon of Michael Cera movies, even - clearly that guy's been coasting on earned goodwill for the incest storyline for a decade now.
Archer is clearly the show's heir, though I can't get through an episode unhigh. Even then I think I only laughed at the Danger Zone thing, and felt immediately embarrassed I had - one of those somehow genius strokes of stupid.
I think what I still might be missing is what people get out of comic characters who are terrible people - sans good jokes, anyway. I can tolerate them but I think they genuinely relax a lot of people, permit judgment to be turned off because everyone's obviously hellbound or something. Or is it something about safety, how an environment's created where people threatening and risking great harm never produce true suffering? I guess what I'm a bit off on is what the comedic amounts to minus jokes, or at least certain versions of it.
I hate feeling hard to please but I find funny everything else I'm demographically obliged to find funny - love Community, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, Seinfeld, Fawlty Towers, early Simpsons and Futurama, the good parts of Gervais shows, the middle seasons of Parks and Recreation etc. But those are all genuinely clever. Arrested Development and Archer are like how those shows would be if you subtracted every laugh, left only the connecting tissue of busy-ness expressing a constant "funny things are going to happen shortly" conviction. Which is a strange effect, and one you can get oddly used to. I guess the various unexcellent bits of excellent shows earn your love too, over time, just because you've put that time in? Presumably love for a person works similarly.
Not that I now love Arrested Development, but unwatchable somehow became fairly watchable. Maybe I was laughing toward the end not because the writing had improved but because I'd just stopped resisting something?
Haven't tried the relaunch yet. Part of what inspired this viewing was the lukewarm reception of the new season - episodes longtime fans hadn't liked might be ones I would, I reasoned.
That and the fact that the show's the alleged best in its category. People sure were right about The Wire, after all.
