May 26th can’t get here fast enough.
Wow.
Squee
I wonder how many takes they had to do.
I imagine them trying to rehearse that and Tony Hale saying “Ya know what, let’s just wait for the cameras to role to light the cigarette, I don’t think I can do that too many times in a row”
I’ve shotgunned things like that before, but I don’t think I could do it that it that many times in a row for multiple takes.
Can’t wait!
That’s… atypical. The show almost never relied on jokes that were supposed to be funny because they went on too long and kept driving the point home. Slightly nervous now if that’s their best preview material.
Relax - it’s an outtake. 
Is that a fill in announcer, just for the clip? Or no Ron Howard?
Here’s a photo still of George Michael taking after GOB from Entertainment Weekly.
This articledoesn’t explicitly say that he’s still narrating, but I certainly inferred it.
Several of the outtakes on the DVDs featured other narrators. I don’t think he records his lines until fairly late in the process. FWIW.
I haven’t seen the outtakes, but I’ve seen other narrated shows where they’ll have someone read the outtakes off to the side so the actors time what they’re doing with how the narration will be read (or the voice over).
Also WRT to the joke going on to long and I don’t know if this is going to be the case, I just watched a special where they mentioned that during the original run they were so constrained for time they had to cut a lot out. Not scenes, but parts of scene. Someone joked that you’ll hardly ever see an actor, for example, walk across a room, because if they did, they would cut it out to get a few extra seconds back. Maybe now, since it’s going to be commercial free (I assume), they don’t have to be as worried about that.
But OTOH, it’s possible they just had him do it 5 or 6 times and they’ll take the two funniest ones, toss some narration over it and be done with it.
I have watched a couple of episodes of this series but don’t see anything of value in it. Does it get better as the first season winds on or in succeeding seasons?
Everyone keeps saying what a great series it is.
Bob
Humor is a subjective thing. I thought it was funny from episode 1 to the day it ended. In fact, probably the most tightly written, intelligent, funniest serial comedy I’ve ever watched. But not everyone has the same sense of humor. It’s okay. I had never heard of it when I happened upon something like the seventh episode of season two. I then, um, “acquired” all the back-episodes to watch on the computer and ended up watching them in marathon fashion in two days. I found it that amazing. My wife, on the other hand, just rolls her eyes and goes to the next room if I find myself watching it. Of course, she hates most of the comedies I like, especially the cartoons like Futurama and The Simpsons. I tend not to have the patience to watch anything for longer than an hour and a half on TV. About the only other series like that for me was Archer. When I discovered it at the end of last season, I had to Netflix every episode I could find and watched them, again, in marathon fashion.
Damn, missed the edit window. Put it this way: If you don’t like it within the first four episodes, you’re not going to like it. The tone of humor is the same throughout. One of the great things about watching it in marathon fashion is that there is a shit-ton of self-referential humor in it and, to this day (much like the Simpsons heydey seasons), there is stuff I catch that I missed the first time around when I watch the occasional re-run. The density of writing just astounds me.
I’m with you, I tried to like it but it just doesn’t do it for me. All the characters are so unlikeable it just annoys me more than anything.
What I’m interested in is if this experiment of returning a cult show to a new Network* like this will make a difference.
*Is Netflix considered a Network?
I tried watching a couple of episodes when it was originally on, and it didn’t grab me. But later I watched the whole series on DVD and enjoyed it.
IMO the more episodes you watch, the more you enjoy the show—not because later individual episodes are higher quality, but because so much builds on what has come before.
And yeah, it doesn’t have sympathetic characters, so if that’s important to you, don’t bother. Part of my original failure to engage with the show may have been that I thought I was supposed to identify with Jason Bateman’s character. Personally, I can enjoy a show with no likable characters, but it really helps if I knwo going into it not to waste time trying to identify with the characters or worry that things will turn out all right for them.
This show doesn’t fit the mold of a typical sitcom. It’s a vehicle for clever writing. There are great visual gags too, but this is the type of story that could be played out on the radio. And it takes a lot of focus to pick everything up, the punch lines can be very subtle, a mix of dialogue, narration, and visual. You have to watch each episode more than once to pick up everything, and it does work much better to watch it in marathon mode to catch all the references that cross episodes. I’d call it a comedic soap opera, but the pace is much faster than a soap. It’s brilliant, and maybe the prototype for a new type of TV program.
I agree that it could work on just the writing and dialogue, but some of those visual gags are my favorite. Little touches like blue hand paint on the walls and stuff that isn’t too obviously drawn attention to, but lets the viewer figure out for him/herself.
Here’s one example from another sitcom that I really enjoy, Modern Family. I caught the joke right in the beginning when I watched it. I feel that Arrested Development would have the type of writing that would just leave it at that, leaving it in the background, giving the viewer a sense of self-satisfaction and “feeling clever” for having caught it, while Modern Family had to emphasize the joke in the end. That’s what I love about Arrested Development. It has jokes that are hammered in, but there’s these little background touches that you have to pay a little attention to notice (although I thought the Modern Family sight gag was pretty clear from the get-go. The hammering-it-down-your-throat kind of spoiled it for me.)