No, I’ve had people watching it with me complain that these people should be in jail, and if the cops were any good they could just watch the show and figure out that George was in the attic.
(Granted, that was one incident, and I’m pretty sure most of her critical thinking brain cells had been killed by The Devil Weed.) Still, yes, that actually happened.
I was thinking about what the difference was last night while I was watching my S2 DVDs, and Dan Castellaneta’s guest episode came on. Let me try another pass at definition. There’s two parts of being an AD fan:
Understands/appreciates where jokes occur.
Thinks they’re funny.
There’s a lot of really subtle almost meta-humor, like the narrator (played by Ron Howard)'s line after a character insults Opie, Scott Baio following Henry Winkler as the family’s lawyer, the visible boom mike after “someone in this room is wired.”
So, I would all the difference between someone that “gets it” and “doesn’t get it” is someone who recognizes those as attempts at humor. They don’t have to think they’re funny, but they have to see what the show is trying to do.
It’s insulting, though, to assume that folks who don’t think it’s funny probably simply don’t understand it. That’s obnoxious, pretentious, insufferable - whatever term you like, it’s not polite and it’s not gonna win you friends except within the subset of Arrested Development fans who are also irritatingly smug.
The people I’ve met in real life who don’t like it tend not to understand it. I have no problem with the people who do understand it and don’t like it.
Am I smug and irritating for seeing patterns in behaviour and predicting future behaviour based on those observations?
Okay, laughing boy, enlighten me. Over the past few years, Fox has boned Dark Angel, Titus, Undeclared, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Firefly, Wanda At Large, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Cedric the Entertainer, The Tick, Greg the Bunny, and of course, Futurama. And a whole lot of other shows as well. Now what, may I ask, is so special about Arrested Development that this time, cancellation is an injustice up with which intelligent people should not put?
Why the fuck do people feel the need to justify their personal preferences to the world in general, anyway? You don’t need a reason to watch it or not watch it. It’s a TV show, not a job applicant, ferchrissakes.
Meaning I beat you to the punch once, while roughly 1,562 times I’ve gone into a thread with something goofy to add and found that you’d beaten me to it.
Um… there isn’t anything that much more special about it? There was similiar outcries of injustice and calls for the blood of Fox executives when Futurama, Firefly, and the Tick were cancelled to name a few. The rest of them weren’t as popular here.
It’s sure as hell not got anything to do with “whiney characters” though.
I’ve never watched it, and I never planned to. But only because it has three people I really really hate to watch: Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walters, and the nails-on-the-chalkboard-of-my-soul David Cross. Recast the roles those three play, bring it back, and I’ll give it a chance.
I’m sorry, but you are wrong here. The genius of AD, the reason why it has such a devoted (though small) audience, is not because of the “zany antics.” It’s the dense layers of humor, the subtle gags, and the callbacks to previous jokes. There’s so much humor packed into each episode that it takes multiple viewings to appreciate it all.
Now, I don’t give a crap whether you watch Arrested Development or not. It’s a TV show. Whether you “get it” or not is not a sign of intelligence. People who feel superior to others because of their taste in TV shows are only revealing their own insecurities. I personally think AD is hilarious, but it doesn’t make me a better person to have watched every episode of the first two seasons multiple times each. It doesn’t make me a worse person that I haven’t seen any of season three yet.
But if someone says the humor of AD lies in the “zany antics,” then they clearly don’t “get it.” Who cares if you don’t “get it?” Not me. Should you care that I think you don’t “get” a TV show you haven’t seen all that much of? Probably not. Should you waste your time watching a show you don’t like in order to say that you “get it” but still don’t like it? That would be silly.