Tag: arrested development

Direct Beam Comms #130

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TV

Arrested Development

Recently, there’s been a spate of TV series to feature the super-rich. Be it ones that take place in modern day like Dynasty or in the recent past like Trust or even in the new HBO show Succession, apparently Hollywood thinks that the rest of the 99% of the people out there are dying to see just how the 1% live. Which I’m happy to report that my favorite series to focus on a 1% family, or at least they used to be a 1% family, Arrested Development has returned for a fifth season on Netflix.

David Cross and Jason Bateman
David Cross and Jason Bateman

So far, Arrested Development has survived two administrations, one economic crash and two networks and is still going strong.

The path of Arrested Development is an interesting one. Always on the verge of being cancelled by FOX where it originally ran for three seasons from 2003–2006, the series was eventually axed but was brought back by Netflix in 2013 for a fourth season, with the fifth having premiered last week.

The Bluth family, the focus of Arrested Development, are the stereotypical rich family who think only of themselves. There’s not a good one in the bunch. Even elder son Michael (Jason Batemen) who seemed like the normal one in the early seasons of the show turned out to be just as selfish as the rest of the family in later ones. He wants to be the guy who does the hard work and comes in and saves things when past accounting practices and some “light treason” by father George (Jeffrey Tambor) threaten the family business. But he’s always looking out for himself. Michael wants to be the “good guy” but also wants everyone to know just how great he is.

Portia de Rossi
Portia de Rossi

Ironically, what started out as an over-the-top take on a rich family back in 2003 quickly became not so over-the-top as the unbelievable things that happened in Arrested Development became reality. The most famous of which was of George and wife Lucille (Jessica Walter) sinking a fortune into land in order to build a wall between the US and Mexico. Which became a part of the 2016 election and is still something in the news today.

The selfishness continues in the fifth season of the series with Michael trying to dodge his neighbor for the $700,000 he owes her, son George Michael (Michael Cera) visiting Mexico for a cultural experience but finding it basically exactly like California, cousin Maeby (Alia Shwkat) taking after her grandmother when it comes to alcohol consumption and Maeby’s mom Lundsay (Portia de Rossi) running for office since she, “…wants to be part of the problem.”

I love Arrested Development and really like this latest Netflix season. I just wish we would have heeded the warnings present from the first episode of the show. 😉

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #127

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

The Expanse

So SyFy channel cancelled the wonderful TV series The Expanse Friday and I have to admit that came as quite a shock to me. The show which has consistently been the most critically acclaimed series on the channel since Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorites on TV and this season in particular has been the strongest yet. For a channel that’s supposedly devoted to fans of science fiction, their slogan is “It’s a Fan Thing,” for them to cancel the best sci-fi show in years that the fans adore doesn’t make sense. 
Maybe SyFy was concerned airing something like The Expanse would make room for more airings of their crappy movies like the Sharknado franchise that for some reason people keep watching.

The ExpanseI should’ve known something was up last winter when SyFy didn’t promote The Expanse as heavily they did in years past. For Krypton we got loads of posters and a TV commercial every break promoting that show, for The Expanse there was one poster and just a single TV spot I can’t ever remember airing. I had to find it myself on YouTube.

Now that I think about it, it’s been a while since the last time a show I was into was cancelled like this. To be sure shows I liked have been cancelled in the past, but it seemed as if they either didn’t work from the start and didn’t get a second season, or they were cancelled but given one more season to wrap things up. For SyFy to kill this show in the middle of the third season, which I can only imagine is going to end on a bit of a cliffhanger with no end to the story in sight is extremely frustrating.

The ExpanseThe Expanse will join other shows that got cancelled after three seasons like Deadwood, Ash vs Evil Dead and a little show I don’t think many people have ever heard of called Star Trek that were all cancelled after year three.

The one hope for The Expanse is that some other network or streaming service will pick it up and to give it a few more seasons of life or at the very least give the creators of The Expanse a chance to finish the story. I can see this happening especially since sci-fi series are so popular these days and The Expanse already has a built in fanbase and critical acclaim.

I’ve written before about the dreck that SyFy currently airs and their cancellation of The Expanse only solidifies my low opinion of them. Their new series Nightfliers does look interesting, but it doesn’t start up until the fall and I’ll check that one out when it airs. But until then I don’t think I’ll be watching much of any thing on SyFy in the near future.

Upfronts

This weeks marks the beginning of the TV Upfronts, or when all the networks debut what new series they’ll be airing next fall/winter. For the series that are picked up this week it means a lot of work for show creators over the summer getting ready for their series to start airing this fall/winter. For those shows not picked up it probably means a long vacation in Hawaii for all involved before starting the process over again in a few months.

This week is an exciting time for me, it’s always cool to see what new shows I’ll be checking out in a few months and to start tracking them now.

One thing I’ve learned is that even if a show sounds interesting during the Upfronts, it doesn’t mean that it will actually be any good next fall. After the Upfronts last year I was really excited about shows like Ghosted, The Gifted, Inhumans and The Crossing. Yet after having actually watched a few episodes of them I quickly lost interest and moved onto other things.

The Orville
The Orville

But the opposite is true too. Last year at this time I was lukewarm over the Seth McFarlane sci-fi series The Orville, yet that show quickly became one of my favorites of this TV season and even made it to my “best of” list last year.

While I do get excited over the Upftonts, I honestly don’t watch too much network TV these days. I can only think of a handful of shows there that I watch, Roseanne, The Good Place, the mentioned The Orville… and that’s about it. And don’t get me started on the dreck that CBS airs years after year after year.

For the most part I get my entertainment from cable and streaming services. Those outlets don’t really have big Upfronts like the networks do and instead release series year round. So while I might get excited about some new sci-fi/horror/superhero show that’ll be airing on FOX in October, chances are when that time comes I’ll be much more interested in what’s airing on AMC, or FX or HBO.

Arrested Development season 5 teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXg2_yExgVY&feature=youtu.be

Movies

The Predator teaser trailer

The Reading List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the week

The Online TV Revolution

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When I first started writing this column nearly a decade ago, legally watching TV shows online wasn’t possible. Slowly, over the years, that started to change and TV series that had already aired on traditional channels became available on iTunes and then Netflix and Amazon in a kind of online syndicated format.

But this year Netflix and Amazon* started something new; they debuted new series on their platforms that skipped the traditional networks altogether. While there’s nothing new about original content online, what’s different here is the amount of money being invested in these series, the quality of the shows and the names involved with them.

Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards
Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards

Debuting last February on Netflix was House of Cards. Starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and Kate Mara and co-produced by David Fincher, Netflix reportedly spent $100 million+ to acquire two seasons of this series. In Cards, Spacey plays U.S. Representative Frank Underwood who craves political power and will stop at nothing as he claws his way towards a future in the oval office. Wright plays his wife Claire and Mara an up and coming reporter whom Frank doles out information to, helping his cause and helping her career.

The case of Arrested Development
The case of Arrested Development

After a long absence from TV, in May the fourth season of Arrested Development became available on Netflix. Bridging the seven year gap since Arrested last aired on Fox, the new Arrested presented the Bluth family in a new light and in a new decade. While they once were a family in charge of a successful and profitable construction company, the Bluth Company collapsed in the great recession leaving the family in disarray.

I’m a huge fan of Arrested and though some thought the Netflix series wasn’t as good as when it was on Fox since they were formatted differently — the fourth season played out like one long story with episodes leading into one and other, referencing other episodes, overlapping at points — I liked it a lot.

The cast of Orange is the New Black
The cast of Orange is the New Black

In July one of my favorite shows of the year Orange is the New Black  premiered also on Netflix. Created by Jenji Kohan (Weeds), this series follows character Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a woman sentenced to 15 months in prison for carrying a suitcase full of drug money through an airport a decade before the start of the show. Things go from bad to worse for Chapman as she has to kisses her upper-middle class existence goodbye and experiences a culture-shock at the prison gates. Inside, she must deal with all sorts of different types of people in her new surroundings and finds out that her ex-lesbian lover (Laura Prepon) who got her into the drug trade is also serving time there too.

It’s the series with the most heart of just about any show I’ve ever seen and is unlike anything else out there. And I can’t think of another series that has a mostly female cast and is a drama rather than a soap opera.

While these new Netflix shows do have all the trappings of traditional TV — they run either 30 minutes or an hour depending on the format, all have opening and closing credits and run 13-15 episodes, about the same as traditional TV — there is one important difference here. All episodes of Netflix shows are available on the premiere date. Meaning that while some viewers will watch all of the fourth season of Arrested in a single weekend others, read me, spent more than a week working my way through it. And with a series like Orange I decided to watch no more than two episodes a week, meaning that it took me a few months to get through it.

ht_house_of_cards_nt_130211_wg

Along with these series both Netflix and Amazon have more series from dramas to comedies and even animated series in the works too from creators like Chris Carter of The X-Files and the Worchowski siblings of The Matrix.

My one question to Netflix on all this is how long can they keep paying creators like Spacey and Fincher hundreds of millions of bucks for series and still charge a flat rate of just $8 per month for all you can stream to its subscribers? It’ll be interesting if this cost rises sooner…or later. Visit me online at DangerousUniverse.com.

*So far, Amazon has aired a few pilot episodes for series, but hasn’t yet debuted a full-fledged series on their platform, though several are scheduled.

The Best TV Shows of 2013, Midseason Edition

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If I had to rate what I thought the best TV series was this season to date, that list would in in order:

The Americans
The Americans
  • Game of Thrones (HBO): I can’t imagine a situation where Game of Thrones isn’t the top show of my end of year “best of” list. It’s so well written, well acted, well directed…it puts most other TV to shame.
  • Veep (HBO): HBO’s funniest comedy in years is also the funniest comedy on TV.
  • Arrested Development (Netflix): A few episodes of this series didn’t work as well as some of the other ones, but I still really enjoyed the return of the Bluth family.
  • Hannibal (NBC): I feel like I’m the only one watching this best network TV drama in years. Hannibal is so good it’s a shame it doesn’t draw more of an audience.
  • The Americans (FX): I can’t wait for this sexy drama to come back next year so I learn the fates of the Soviet sleeper agents hidden in early 1980s Washington DC and, more importantly, the fates of the FBI agents hunting them.
  • Mad Men (AMC): Even in its sixth season Mad Men continues to surprise.
  • House of Cards (Netflix): I liked House of Cards right up until the very end. It’s still a good show, I just felt like there needed to be at least some closure on things rather than just having an ending.

And there are a lot of promising shows on the horizon this summer and next season too. There’s a lot to be excited about.