FOX and Arrested Development
I love Arrested Development and I’m sad to see it go, but a lot of the criticism of FOX from its fans is overblown and unfair:
Arrested Development is on the worst network at the worst time with the worst shows. This may have helped the most critically acclaimed comedy on TV attract the five or six people who are fans of Prison Break and Kitchen Confidential, but for the rest of us, Monday nights on Fox is hardly the ideal venue for your best show. Especially when the already shitty schedule is interrupted for a month by baseball and is about to be interrupted again to make room for a double-helping of Prison Break during sweeps.
What this ignores is that for two years FOX gave it one of the best timeslots in all of television - Sunday night after The Simpsons - and probably the best timeslot in television HISTORY for a “quirky” comedy. They are pulling it for sweeps, but that’s because, as everyone admits, nobody watches it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that FOX was the only network that would dream of putting Arrested Development – and Married With Children, and The Simpsons, and The Family Guy, and Futurama, and Malcolm in the Middle, and Bernie Mac, and America’s Most Incompetent Government Organization – on TV in the first place. Everything you can say about FOX’s close-mindedness in this debacle is doubly true of the Big Three.