Friday, 09 January 2004
Arresting Arrested Development - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER - Arrested Development, a Fox sitcom that's debuted this past fall, is highly recommended. (My colleague Marlon Richmond, in his fall TV preview called the program "supposedly the top sitcom of the season," with "good pedigree.") Some of the better sitcoms in the past five or so years have been those without a laugh track. Monk, a critical fave does without one, as does Larry David's hilarious Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sex and the City, ditto for Sports Night, which was also a fave amongst critics.
Admittedly I was not a regular viewer of the program until I heard that comeback kid Liza Minnelli was going to guest. I tuned in, with or without Minnelli, the show's a hoot. It's brilliantly written and it's brilliantly acted. It stars a cast of players that you all have known and loved in past series television incarnations. Jason Bateman plays the lead, a fairly normal man amongst a squad of irregular folks - his family. It's a sitcom about a dysfunctional family, which led the television critic for the Washington Post Tom Shales to note, that since Fox has a number of programs that revolve around dysfunctional families, we might as well just call them "Dis-Fox-ional".
Shales, in a laudatory piece about the series, where he called the program "insanely, pathologically funny, and in a hard-to-define and original way," doesn't even mention the creative minds behind the program, focusing on the immense acting talent that's showcased. There's Bateman, the only real normal person with any semblance of reality; there's also Jeffery Tambor, who has made a career out of playing hapless losers. Remember him as The Ropers's inept neighbour? What about his Emmy-nominated role as Hank on The Larry Sanders Show? He's a sitcom icon. Jessica Walter, whom I've never encountered before plays Tambor's wife; and they've got a daughter who's played by the gifted Portia De Rossi, late of Ally McBeal. There are some other incidental actors, who play extraordinary roles with verve, subtly and great comedic timing. They are: Will Arnett, Tony Hale and David Cross. Watch the show and you'll appreciate just how superb they are. So are the two kids in the show, the tortured Michael Sera who plays Bateman's son George Michael; so tortured because he takes a hankering for his cousin Maeby, played by Alia Shawkat. Sera, is particularly good, but to single him out of the remarkable ensemble would take away from the essence of the show - good writing, terrific direction, and distinctive editing.
And just who are the creators that Shales neglects to mention? Well, the program was created by Mitchell Hurwitz, who comes from The Golden Girls and The Ellen Show, as well as co-executive produced by Academy Award winning producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who collectively have been responsible for 8 Mile, A Beautiful Mind (which Howard won an Oscar for directing as well), the Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor series and Parenthood.
The show is in risk of being cancelled because few have been watching. Since Liza Minnelli's arc has aired, ratings have doubled, meaning they haven't been so grand to begin with. Mind you, her role is rather small, and you'll miss it if you blink. At its essence however is the extraordinarily gifted ensemble and thanks to that the show has been a critical favourite garnering a Golden Globe nomination for best comedy series, as well as a citation as one of the year's best programs from the American Film Institute.
Shales implores his readers to watch the show, to save the most "criminally comedic new series of the year" from the cancellation heap. I do the same here, because if for nothing else, in watching the show you will not be in any risk of not being entertained.
Arrested Development airs Sunday nights on Fox, at 9.30 pm.
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Questions and comments may be sent to: editor@thecommentary.ca
An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE .