“A casual relationship with reality”
Categories: Television
While accepting the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series, "Arrested Development" creator Mitchell Hurwitz said "I'd be remiss in not pointing out that the Academy has now twice rewarded us for a show you refuse to watch," and then begged people to tune in the next night for the season premiere.
So despite literally begging on national television the night before, people still couldn't be bothered to watch the funniest sitcom since "Seinfeld" was at its best. "Arrested Development" came in fifth place for the night, behind even the WB's God-awful "7th Heaven". For two years now, critics and fans have been raving about this show, you'd think people would check it out, but they didn't. Well, too bad for them, because the season premiere was "Arrested Development" at the top of its game. This season's premiere was even better than last year's. Here's hoping the ratings improve, but unfortunately that means people would have to somehow manage to tear themselves away from "The King of Queens". Anyhow, if you didn't watch it, don't go thinking it's too late to start. For my part, I'm gonna stop worrying about the ratings and just enjoy it.
There is some justice though, "My Name is Earl", which premiered Tuesday night, did really well in the ratings and happily, it deserved to. Usually the show NBC hypes to death is some piece of crap that doesn't even make it to midseason. And "Earl" had hype — I heard a radio ad for it that even made fun of the magazine ad NBC ran in Entertainment Weekly last week. When you have the advertising budget to run commercials for a show that diss other ads for the very same show, you might be yelling a bit too loudly. But "Earl" was great, very funny and very original. I've always liked Jason Lee a lot, and even though he's nearly totally unrecognizable in his white-trash moustache, he's still a ton of fun to watch.
Somehow the ratings for "Earl" didn't manage completely transfer to "The Office" which was on right after. That's a shame, it compares really well with the original British version. It's a different show but it does maintain the rhythm of the original as well as the ability to make awkward silences hilarious. I thought that after "The 40-Year Old Virgin" was such a hit, the show would pick up viewers, but it doesn't seem to have helped, though they still earned twice the viewers "Arrested" got.*
So, at the moment, this season has delivered in quality, if not success, on show's I've been looking forward to. Of course, the show that I'm most excited to see return is "Lost", which is starting in about 45 minutes. They won the Emmy for Best Drama the other night and no one expected it to go any other way. Since it ended last season, all the networks except for UPN have, in one form or another, created their own "Lost" ripoff. Most of them look like they miss the point of what made the show work, but as long as J.J Abrams and Damon Lindeloff haven't forgotten (and there's no reason to believe they have), tonight should be great. Plus, "Lost" is one of those water-cooler shows, and I've missed getting to rehash it the next day at work.
* Well, probably not twice as much. The report I read combined "Arrested Development" with "Kitchen Confidential" and averaged out the ratings for the hour. Presumably "Arrested" got more than "Kitchen", although the two shows were probably reasonably close to each other or it wouldn't have been combined.
posted by Mark Kawakami at September 21, 2005, 08:09 PM // permalink // (4) Comments