As you may have noticed by glancing at every post on every single website on the Internet over the past week or so, people are a little excited about the new season of Arrested Development. And with Netflix dropping all 15 episodes this Sunday at 12:01 AM, on a holiday weekend, there’s going to be a lot of temptation and pressure to take all of that content and shove it into your eyes as fast as you can. But series creator Mitch Hurwitz thinks it would be better if you, like, didn’t do that.
His reasoning for this is that the brain can only take so much of an in-depth, multi-layered comedy full of obscure pop culture references and quick sight gags before it starts getting tired and missing things. And if the whole point of binge-watching is GIMMEGIMMENOW ALL OF IT NOW GIMME GIMME, you’re kind of kneecapping yourself by consuming it in a way that actually lessens your ability to suck up “all” of the available material. A fair point.
But on the other hand, doing sh*t fast is awesome. I can see both sides.
Hurwitz does have one other request, which is more of a demand, actually. Remember when he first started talking about the new season and said viewers would be able to watch the episodes in any order they want without missing anything? Yeah … scratch that.
“Not only will the episodes be available at the same time on Netflix, but they also cover the same period of time in the characters’ lives. So it seemed like, yeah, you should be able to jump in in any order and see George Michael’s episode and then maybe Buster’s episode, if you want, and see what each of them is doing,” Hurwitz explained. But he found out in post-production that the plan wouldn’t work, specifically because the many jokes and sight gags that span multiple episodes would not pay off in the right way, or even at all, if viewed out of order. “Our brains like to make stories out of things and that requires order. I pretty quickly realized everything here is about the order of telling the stories, that there will be shows where you find out a little bit of information and then later shows where you revisit the scene and you find out more information — and that’s not fun in reverse. To get more information first and then less information isn’t as interesting. I thought, okay, this may not be up for debate.”
So, to recap: Try not to watch the new season like a weirdo. The end.
(Via Vulture)
