killing time, no. 2

Evidently a presidential candidate debate is happening tomorrow. Guess it’s theoretically interesting that neither candidate is an incumbent and one is an ex-president, but debates are archaic excuses for media bums to hear themselves talk.

Glad I don’t have cable anymore; I was paying like $100 a month for the privilege of theoretically half-watching the Super Bowl. Now I just have HBO and TCM, which is enough depravity for me. It’s funny, the longer I hover around the edges of the entertainment business, the more I think TV actually is mind-rotting, a simulation of human interaction in the background while you use your phone.

It feels like it’s the worst it’s been in my lifetime. No sense of discovery, too much stuff, most of it fake, not even bad enough to piss me off, and it’s all so damn cheap and dead.

Case in point (this will come together, probably). I was looking through the cell phone I had in high school: an N-Gage QD. Don’t laugh, it was free and phones weren’t good yet anyway and the store was giving the games away for like five bucks (these were interesting actually, because the system could render 3D but the screen resolution was zilch and the buttons barely usable so you got to see developers get clever). I went to the voice recording app and found that almost all the recordings were clips from Arrested Development.

I loved that show so much that I actually held a cell phone up to the TV so I could hear my favorite jokes in between classes. I watched it from day one, before the DVDs, because I thought it had a perfect ensemble. The Larry Sanders and Mr. Show connections alone made me obsessed with it. I still have bitter memories of watching the last four episodes, which were burned off on a Friday against the Olympics. I was all in on the “corporations are destroying truly intelligent comedy!” thing. Even talked about it on a radio show at the time. Shameful. Latchkey madness.

Haven’t watched the show in many years but spend a lot of time reflecting on how foundational it was to my own writing and sense of humor, how I tried to learn the right lessons from it and watch it differently from all those “other fans.”

The editing, the constant movement, the cross-talk, the layering, the joke density and setups that took whole seasons to pay off—that’s what worked. The muted sentimentality of a wealthy neocon family in the Bush era trying to be human beings and having no idea how. And a very specific kind of California wealthy family. A bunch of assets and investments so mishandled that they buy store brand soda. Prison of their own devising. That worked.

What didn’t work was usually callbacks. It‘s one rung up the ladder from saying May the 4th be with you. And the whimsy, especially when it veered to the cartoonish. It was always in this uncomfortable middle where it couldn’t be totally realistic but it couldn’t quite drop an anvil on somebody’s head.

All that memory, all the reverse engineering I aimlessly tried to do when I watched it as a Teen, means I spend a lot of time thinking about the Netflix seasons. They’re fascinating because they’re so revealing about what’s going sideways with television and streaming specifically. They should have been good. There were a thousand opened doors to make them good.

But they weren’t. They were terrible. Every benign tumor went stage four. Constant callbacks. Pervasive attempts at cartoon gags that went from awkward to straight-up uncanny, like a space alien trying to make a child laugh. The wackiness became hopelessly sweaty as the actors aged.

The article on a real website question is what went wrong, but it’s all right there, laid out for you. And the answer looks dead simple. Money.

It’s jaw-dropping how many corners were cut. They cut corners you don’t even think about in comedy. It was lit for shit. People were green-screened in so often, there were so many stand-ins, that you lost all sense of being in the room with a person. There was padding everywhere. Even when the cast was “together” you could tell the amount of days production got with them was low and inconvenient. There was so much ADR and the plots were so convoluted and piecemeal that you got the sense there wasn’t a full blown writers’ room, or they didn’t have much time. All problems that could have been solved with a proper budget.

It all came off as something beyond bad or even embarrassing. It came off undignified. You felt sorry for almost everybody. Thirty whole episodes that looked worse than a commercial with scripts so unmemorable I can only remember one scene, period (the rapists/murderers riff, the only time it felt like they had any oxygen left). I had whole scripts to that thing memorized in 2005.

If you enjoy pain, it’s a great thing to watch if you want to know the problems with streaming, with the way we make TV now. A perfect example of the worst-case scenario. You can throw the best people in the game on a project and come back with unwatchable detritus when you don’t respect that there’s a right way to make TV. Arrested Development is what happens when you use non-union equivalents all the way down. There are things you can’t save money on. They’ll destroy the whole engine.