Arrested Development

When I say I never watch television, this is of course not entirely true. During the (all too) few hours a week I get to spend with my husband when neither of us are working and the boys are in bed, we usually watch something together. It's a bit more social than reading in the same room (mostly because someone won't stop talking, and the constant interruptions make me.... well, let's just say anti-social).

But we never really watch shows on TV. Mostly this is because we have vastly different tastes, but my work schedule in particular is too erratic to ever be able to be there same night, same time to catch the next episode of anything.

Then God created TV on DVD. This is in fact where I discovered Buffy and Angel. Firefly I did watch live. Which brings me to the other reason I don't watch TV - the shows I like always get axed. Which brings me to the show I wanted to discuss: the also-axed ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

This show is brilliant. I'm impressed with the casting, for crying out loud. Henry Winkler as a closeted gay lawyer? Brilliant. Liza Minelli as a woman suffering from vertigo? I don't think I've ever liked her in anything, but she's brilliant in this. And Ron Howard as the narrator? Who doesn't love little Opie Cunningham?

But of course, being me, what I love most is the writing. Yeah, it's funny, but what slays me is the structure of the thing. It's clearly guided by one man's vision, plotted out with season-long and series-long arcs, complete with foreshadowing, set-up, and closure.

Most sit-coms fail to do any of those things. Stuff happens. Next week, more stuff happens, but it's like last week is already forgotten. As much as I loved FRIENDS, it always bugged me how Chandler and Ross could still be portrayed as geeks/losers when they were bedding a different woman every other episode. Any real geek can tell you, they don't get laid quite that much. In defense of FRIENDS, they did near the end use the absurdness of their collective history for humor. I loved FRIENDS, the jokes were great. But there was never any arc there, any grand plan for where it was all going.

Of course that's the point of a sit-com. You're supposed to catch this or that episode, and everything you need to know about the characters is contained in the theme song to catch the new viewers up. I'm sure part of why ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT never caught on was that you really had to see every episode in order to appreciate it (which brings us back to TV on DVD, the perfect format).

One of the longest-running arguments in writing circles is whether or not one should write an outline before starting to write a novel. Writers arguing for one point of view or another can come up with all sorts of arguments for why there way is the right way (and in the case of some egos, the only way). But I think whichever way the writer writes, with or without an outline, reflects their feelings about structure in what they take in, reading or TV or movies. I happen to like highly-structured things. Have you ever seen the outlines Joyce used to write ULYSSES? Good God, on my best day nothing I do will ever approach that level of structure. One of the argument against outlining is it's more "realistic" to write without one. When you get up in the morning, you don't know what's going to happen. A writer shouldn't know what's going to happen either.

This is half a thought, I'm afraid, as dinner must be made. Suffice it to say, I don't like the word "realistic" applied to my writing style or my reading preferences.