Well, it doesn't look good for the Bluth Co.
FOX yesterday benched Arrested Development for the remainder of the November sweeps. VARIETY and others are reporting that the episode order was also cut from 22 to 13.
Now it's true that FOX has cut the episode order every year, but never this much. No one seems to be saying cancellation yet, but you have to assume the writing's pretty much on the wall.
I was one of four million tuned in to see the show's post-baseball return on Monday, and I laughed pretty hard the whole hour. But sadly, though those numbers weren't that far off what the show has done this season, two Very Bad Things combined to put the shiv to the further adventures of the Bluths: the show dragged down the ratings for Prison Break, which follows it...and number two: reruns of Prison Break in that timeslot tend to do better.
(By the way, Kitchen Confidential also got the same no-love treatment, but let's not dwell on the further misadventures of Ex-Alias and Buffy alums.)
There's going to be lots of blame-gaming coming down the pike in the next little while. So, really, who's to blame?
There will be tons of fanboy rage directed toward FOX. But I don't think that's fair. I was shocked when they renewed it at all. Gutsy move. They've done their best trying to get Arrested an audience. They haven't been stingy with timeslots or promo power. The show won Emmys galore, and they knew they had a prestige project on their hands. Compared to say, Family Guy, I can honestly say that FOX seemed to always treat Arrested with respect and with a genuine concern that the show didn't seem to connect with an audience.
Do you blame the creators for making a show that wasn't accessible?
Well, maybe. I don't know. I've got to confess that this entire third season, the show has felt to me like they're just doing things to make themselves laugh. Which is fine, because that's exactly my sense of humor and I find the show hilarious. But I can see how the show was impenetrable to people who hadn't tuned in before. And let's face it, if you can't get an audience for a show where Charlize Theron is your guest star, there has got to be something else going on.
Do you blame the audience?
I'm sure you're going to see some of these articles. Critics hate it when people don't watch the things they praise -- even though that's hardly a rare occurrence. Here in Canada, there will be the inevitable examples that point to Arrested's failure to thrive as an example of how dumb or unsophisticated the US viewing audience is. (Seriously, there's a small and persistent population of cultural elitists who love playing that game. This, in a country that played Variety shows in Prime Time with people playing fiddles into the 1990's. Tommy Hunter. Rita MacNeil. Brrrr.)
Arrested was a dense show. It moved fast and furiously, it didn't circle back and include you in. I watched my parents watch it one night, and they were...completely...utterly....totally lost. Actually, it was kind of sweet.
But at the same time, I feel pretty leery about blaming the audience because they didn't like a show. LOST is a hit, and it's smart. But it also appeals to a very large group of people -- probably lots who aren't smart. Arrested demanded that you follow, and that you know things, and that you were quick.
I went to the Genie Awards a few years ago (they're like Canada's Oscars, except, um...soooooo Not) and, if you can picture this, filmmaker after filmmaker got up and basically berated the audience (who wasn't watching on tv) for not going to see these "great" Canadian movies that were winning all the awards. To them, it was fully and completely the audience's fault. Imagine their impertinence, not showing up to see the nominated masterpieces! I wanted to throw up.
Nope -- blaming the audience isn't gonna get you anywhere, son.
So the thing I keep coming back to is this: maybe it's no one's fault.
Network TV is in such a squeeze right now that I can't exactly blame them for benching a comedy that underperforms, especially when they give every opportunity for it to catch on and find an audience. Seinfeld started out disastrously too, after all. NBC gambled and it paid off eventually. FOX gave Arrested the good ride, and it just didn't pan out.
And 4 million viewers, or 5 million viewers -- is that really such a small number? If the real estate wasn't so expensive, Arrested wouldn't be such a disappointment. We crow over the Daily Show and Chappelle's show and The Shield and Battlestar Galactica -- but those shows don't reach nearly the amount of people as Arrested did on its worst week.
And it's not like My Name is Earl or The Office are burning up the airwaves over on NBC, either. Scrubs is smart, and hilarious, and it's never had a big audience.
Maybe it's just time to admit that comedy, unlike drama, is such a hard medium, and so dependent on taste, that the idea of a wide-appeal comedy might be a thing of the past. In a world where everyone's experience is fragmented, when we all have different touchstones and obsessions, maybe there's no middle ground to make that broad appeal comedy TV series anymore.
Or maybe Americans really do want to see more fat guys with skinny wives. I don't know.
I'm just glad Arrested got its three seasons, however truncated. And you bet I'll pull the chair up to the TV the next time I see Mitch Hurwitz has a show.
Road Tripping
1 hour ago
5 rumbles:
Completely hypothetical question, Denis, but how do you think the show would have fared on HBO?
good question.
the paradox is that it probably would have been lauded, and gotten all the same coverage, and be feted as a hit and an only on HBO show. It would have won all the same Emmys. It would have probably had the same cast.
And probably 50-60% less people would have seen it.
I mean, the only comedy that HBO has tried lately is The Comeback, which sucked because it sucked.
I guess there's Entourage. That's HBO, right? That's a perfect example. That show is a huge buzz magnet right now. But I guarantee you that Arrested's numbers were way higher.
But the rub is that even if it got five seasons on HBO, it probably would still have the exact number of eps, because HBO does 13 episode seasons. See? Now my head hurts.
How do you reconcile this with your aside on the premise vs. backstory post (thanks for that post, btw!) about Frasier and the ten percenters or, as it turned out, the less euphonious 40-50 percenters?
The moral of that seems to be that audiences are more sophisticated than they're given credit for. But then we have Arrested Development, which is being put on trial in some quarters for being too intellectual and esoteric.
Is the problem that AD was pretty much nothing but 40-50 percenters? That Frasier could get away with those jokes, but have roughly double the audience because it also had stuff broad enough to appeal to the 60-50 percent of its overall audience who weren't getting the 40-50 percenters?
Well I think there were a few things going on with Frasier. The first, of course, is the fact that the character had 8 or 9 years of good feeling built up around him from Cheers. The second was the fact that Frasier very cleverly played into what is a deep, deep seeded anti-intellectualism at the core of a lot of American entertainment. Martin, the homespun father, was usually right, and Frasier and Niles, the erudite educated types, were usually wrong. That's a good recipe for mass appeal right there. Then, aside from the 10 percenters, there really was a lot of very broad based comic stuff in there -- from Daphne to the slapstick lovesick Niles to the earthy jokes about Roz's sexually voracious nature to Bulldog's entire character. And then there's the subtextual genius, that those two Crane brothers were probably the gayest guys on tv -- but it was all okay and non-threatening, because, guess what, they're not gay, and anyway they're brothers!
Not to take away from the brilliance of the execution, but I think the brand really helped. I'm not sure a show about a rarefied psychiatrist and his brother would have worked if you weren't already familiar with Frasier.
In the case of Arrested, yeah, I think the show is aggressively smart, and odd, and offbeat. And since it's not animated, it's a hard sell.
The problem with that show is that there wasn't something for everyone. Far from it. The things that I loved about the show, and that fans of the show love about it, are the very things that probably new viewers didn't like. There was no middle ground like on Frasier.
The audience may be smarter than a lot of people give them credit for, but that doesn't mean their sense of humor is sophisticated...
Good answers Denis.
Fraiser was an excellent show, but when you get right down to it, the structure was that of a farce. There was very little difference between Fraiser and Three's Company - A lot of misunderstandings. I'm not demeaning the show, I think what they did was quite brilliant. A smart show build on a very basic and simple premise.
It was also filmed in front of a live studio audience, giving it a laugh track...
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