There are a lot of scatological comparisons that one can hit up when describing the fleeting pleasure of Arrested Development: a really good dump after being backed-up for days; the biggest fart you’ve ever let off, in length, intensity and girth.  Really, though, it seems just filthy trying to point out the fleeting, overall satisfaction of this cancelled television series.  A fart and a dump are rather necessary to the general health of your intestinal tract, but playing around with either one is disgusting.

As much as Arrested Development was needed to help transition television comedy away from the Seinfeld setup, AD was needed to help reel a new generation of viewers into what will become, undoubtedly, this generation’s Newhart.

Before I go on, Bob Newhart is downright hilarious.  Go get his book, or better yet, get the audio book.  He reads it and his delivery is fantastic.  Do it now.  Don’t buy the third season of Arrested Development on DVD.  Spend your money wisely, for once.

Digression aside, fuck the movie and fuck you, Arrested Development, for having retarded fans that might warrant a movie.  The creative bankruptcy of the movie industry is evident so that in 2009, the biggest blockbusters will be adapted from toys played by kids of twenty years ago.  Granted, the two figured (G.I. Joe and Transformers, if you didn’t guess yet, you twit) were predominant in the shared culture over the last two years, but so was AIDS.  Where is my AIDS: The Movie?  Don’t you fucking tell me that Philadelphia or the ending to Forrest Gump is all I’m getting.  I want CGI AIDS.  I want Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay AIDS.  I want AIDS with Jay-Z on the soundtrack and guest cameos by Jack Black and Samuel L. Jackson.

Not quite the blight upon humanity but almost as unpleasant, Arrested Development launched the career of Michael Cera.  Known for being the star graduate from the Will Ferrell School of Lazy Acting, Cera has rocked the awkward jackass teenager character in every project that he’s worked on, humping that dry leg for all the hipster money he can get.  Thank you, hipsters, for your shitty tastes have once again ruined the world for a good five years.

Having no urge to see Juno, Superbad, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist or fuck whatever comes next in the douchebag’s career – fuck, what was I saying?  I was so unenthused just writing the names of projects that feature Cera’s apathetic approach to crafting a character, the fallback on “stammering idiot” and “sensitive guy you’d want to kick in the teeth because he’s so passive,” that I lost any urge to go on with a point.  Shit.  How about another Judd Apatow movie?

What?  He’s doing one about terminal illness now?  Wow.  Man, that’s pretty fucking lame.  Oh, he did a movie with Jack Black and Michael Cera as cavemen?  God, why the fuck did Arreste–oh.  Yeah.  That’s what.

Fuck Arrested Development.  Yeah, yeah, another cult show on Fox got the shaft.  Boo-fucking-hoo.  Look, it was too witty for its own good.  It bordered on precocious too fucking much, like there was a pregnant pause where it was expected that Ron Howard would walk into frame, give the audience a week and leave.

I’ll admit, I watched Arrested Development when it first came around on Sundays since I had no cable and it was easier to leave the television on than turn it off.  From what I saw, it was a decently written series written by a man noted for The Ellen Show and half a season of The Golden Girls.  I think that might sum up the feeling from watching Arrested Development: it’s both benign as a grandmother in Florida and topical as a blonde woman saying she likes to kiss girls.

So, as long as it was on Sundays, I caught it.  It left, came back, and left again.  People were all happy about AD on the Internet, but that didn’t translate to ratings.  It’s another cult show with a rabid fanbase that couldn’t move units and fuck – there it went.  Got a shortened third season, saw the writing on the wall and wrapped itself up.

I watched the two-hour block that Fox used to dump all the remaining episodes of season three, one big series-ending finale to bid the characters good-bye.  Shit, it ended well enough.  Every loose end was tied, every witty joke was made.  Most shows get the idea that the end is coming, but be it grace or the many awards it won, AD got the chance to actually write a finale and put a creative cap on the show.  It was a good ending and I don’t see why a movie has to come about.  I don’t see the need for it.  I also don’t see the need for Jack Black and Michael Cera to dress up as cavemen.  What do I know?

Cera almost saved himself from getting kicked in the teeth by expressing he might not be on board for this movie.  I guess his star has risen so much, now he rolls around in a fake-fur smock with a fat-ass who used to be in a fake band.  Practical Oscar material, this fucking role.  I guess Cera thought himself too busy, but no, news comes out that the movie’s a go and that it might be around next year.  Fuck.

We could have been better off had news of the AD movie never happened in the first place.  This can be said about the tsunami that killed over 150,000 and the genocides in Africa that continue to desolate the people of the land.  The same can be said about this stupid television series.  The docu-comedy, the half-sincere bullshit of it all might have never taken.  We’d be out Pineapple Express and Kevin Smith would finally stop making movies.

Doesn’t that sound nice?  It’s this commitment to failure that drives me crazy, and I’m ready to move on to some real creative mojo.  Why the fuck do we need a movie for Arrested Development, a show that’s been off the air for three years?  Why do we need to create what will just be a 120-minute episode that will not so much answer questions, but pose new questions and answer them (hopefully) in the allotted time?  Fuck that.  Fuck you.  It’s time to grow up and move on.

There’s nothing fun about being one age forever.  There’s enough shit out there you weren’t around for that you can discover and be just as excited as you are pining away for the Bluth Company.  There’s bound to be something worthwhile going on RIGHT NOW, though you have to wade through miles of shit for it.  Hey, it’s a higher quality of shit because it’s not Arrested Development shit.  Goddamn, I tried to avoid the scat images but when you’re digging through the already-digested material of pop culture, it’s hard not to come out smelling like your septic tank.

Proof that Robot Chicken has become more elaborate as a show can be found on “They Took My Thumbs.”  This particular episode has almost eliminated the five-to-ten-second gag, aside from a decent Hall and Oates reference and a bestiality gag even Jon Dore wouldn’t touch.  The show almost doesn’t feel like Robot Chicken.

“Wildman” is this episode’s best sketch.  Sebastian Bach makes it work by being his usual Rock God^™ self.  Baz is still hard rock’s walking punchline, not that he gives a shit.  I hope Baz does more stuff where people are laughing with him and not at him.

Some of the sketches in “They Took My Thumbs” are weak.  ”You Bet Your Ass That’s a Boulder” takes its one Raiders of the Lost Ark-derived gag and stretches the hell out of it.  A boulder, two hundred darts and an altar’s weak point make for an elaborate way to protect a gold idol, but this five-second observation is padded to two and a half minutes.

“Train Man” and “Thursday the 12th” are slice-of-life tales.  ”Train Man” concerns one man’s desire to succeed despite a subway train almost cutting him in half.  ”Thursday the 12th” shows Jason Voorhees’ daily activities when he’s not slaughtering teens.  Neither sketch is funny.  ”Train Man” attempts Futurama-style poignancy, which is odd coming from this show.

“Bring a Sidekick to Work Day”…I like the fact that the “original” Aqualad was a limbed fish that could survive out of water.  Robot Chicken doesn’t resort to those ever-fresh ‘Aquaman is gay’ jokes in this episode.

Comedy gold should come out of Wonder Girl, Robin, Speedy, Kid Flash and human Aqualad.  The best “Bring a Sidekick to Work Day” can do is The Martian Manhunter’s “invisible” sidekick, which isn’t good.  Robot Chicken has done better superhero parodies, so the attention to period detail is wasted.

“They Took My Thumbs” is a weak Robot Chicken episode.  The episode’s slower pace doesn’t beget funnier material.  I appreciate the show’s effort to be more than farting and retards, but “They Took My Thumbs” is a little padded.  Luckily, the fourth season gets better from here.

Another year, another season of Robot Chicken.  It’s like this sort of thing happens every year on an arbitrary date decided by [adult swim].

Every Robot Chicken season premiere has to have a big “we’re renewed” introductory sketch, so Seth Green and Matthew Senreich hit up Joss Whedon, Seth MacFarlane and Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ron Moore for work.  It doesn’t matter that Green and Senreich killed [adult swim]’s Mike Lazzo last season.  Robot Chicken’s famous for dead people magically coming back to life, sometimes in the very next sketch.  Cartoons are neat.

Seeing Joss Whedon and Ron Moore kill each other warms my heart as I find both Battlestar Galactica and Whedon overrated, but the sketch itself isn’t funny.  I hate the “Robot Chicken cancelled/renewed” cliffhangers.  Robot Chicken is one of [adult swim]’s most popular shows.  Robot Chicken has at least three more years of being milked.

“I Am Needed Upstairs” is the best sketch of the episode.  Seth MacFarlane’s Trojan Man routine (“the reservoir tip is for your semen!”) helps sell the sketch, otherwise it’s the typical “fictional character in real world” mashup.  ”I Am Needed Upstairs” works due to its use of dialogue, something Robot Chicken isn’t as good at as Dead Baby Comedy.

“Can’t Be a Crime to Kick a Dope Rhyme” is also notable.  Although the sketch is just okay, it wins points for referencing PaRappa the Rapper and replicating its paper-thin look.  Three seasons ago, characters in Robot Chicken weren’t even in scale.  The show has come far.

Tila Tequila’s sketch (“Pre-Pubescent Alien Whore”) is watchable enough, even though the Terminator 2 reference is just there and I could give a potted damn about anything or anyone Tila Tequila does and/or has sex with.  She got a plug for her MTV show in, so that’s her role fulfilled.

The ending sketch, “Just the Good Parts,” is a mixed bag.  It’s similar to season one’s “Welcome to the Spoilers,” but isn’t as funny.  There’s a callback to the beginning of the episode, which is wasted on Seth Green dying.

The occasional Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seth MacFarlane cameos are fine, as are the credit references to Gellar and Mila Kunis.  MacFarlane making fun of Family Guy’s manatee gags, though, comes across as mutual ass-patting.  MacFarlane’s awesome, I get it.  He only says that about himself once every three seconds.  Robot Chicken can structure a much better gag than Family Guy at this point.

“Help Me” is a fairly solid season premiere for Robot Chicken.  At this point viewers and non-fans alike should know what to expect – farting, retards, nut shots, clever satire with ironic subtext and Joey Fatone cameos.  Robot Chicken may be maturing, but it’s still crude and offensive.  May this show never be up its own ass with self-importance.

Tonight (February 13th, 2009) is when Joss Whedon’s latest television foray, Dollhouse, premieres on the Fox network.  Dear god, why?  Check this from the wiki:

“…Whedon had a 5-year plan for the show and had already planned out the evolution of his characters through that point.  Whedon has said repeatedly that he hates ‘rewind television,’ episodes where the characters don’t learn and don’t evolve from show to show.  That’s why he has already mapped out an evolution for his characters.”

Five years!  Motherfucker needs to get through the first season before he starts talking shit about FIVE years.

Jesus Christ, this is Whedon’s biggest flaw.  He can’t write for television, not the primetime big networks.  He’s too concerned with the long stories of each main character – and FUCK, this Dollhouse series is boasting NINE of them. NINE! – that he’s not seeing the immediate.  If the casual viewer can’t immediately latch onto ONE character, they’re not going to give an everloving fuck about NINE.  Shit, I thought that was elementary.  The viewer only has so much attention to give; over-taxing their attention span makes them switch the channel.

Whedon is spoiled.  He got away with the long television run on Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of it always being on a second-tier network.  Had The WB and UPN grown the huevos to challenge the bigger networks, Buffy would not have lasted as long as it did.  It was never in a position to be in direct competition with any of the shows on the bigger channels, and that needs to be understood.  Buffy was on a network that had lax emphasis on generating the ratings.  A show that brought in four million viewers on average could be considered, to that network, a success.

The wiki lists the highest season rating for Buffy at 5.3 million viewers.  The lowest seasonal rating for House is 13.3.  If any of the Firefly episodes brought in that many viewers, it would still be on the air.  Instead, we have a not-even-one season with a rabid fanbase bitching on the wiki about how Fox fucked up the order of the episodes, that the pilot was a two-parter that didn’t get shown the right way.  Bullshit.

Y’know, Star Trek: The Next Generation had a two-parter for a pilot, but TNG didn’t have nine main fucking characters.  TNG didn’t need two hours to wade through Whedon dickery to get the basic points of “this is the bad guy,” “this is the good guy” and “this is the conflict of the episode.”  Whereas TNG – any successful television sci-fi, really – could be picked up by any boob flipping channels, Whedon’s shit needed you to know what the fuck was going on in all the past episodes in order for the viewer to understand what was going on.

Hating “rewind television” means hating television.  Even with TiVo, DVR and all the advances of science, the bulk of a show’s viewers are walk-in customers who, interested at the flash they see, stay on the channel.  Look at Fox’s successful shows.  House doesn’t require any brainpower when you tune in for your first episode.  There’s the asshole brilliant doctor, his assistants who hate and worship him, the sexual tension with a female that gets either resolved or complicated in the episode and some kind of disease that gets convolutedly cured by the end of the show.  There are always small favors given to the dedicated who stick around week after week, but the episode is written to draw people in.

I mean – fuck, ‘Til Death, the mediocre sitcom about suburban married life featuring Brad Garrett, brings in the same ratings that Buffy did.

Fuck Joss Whedon and fuck his fans, who do elaborate displays of assholery in order to convince the rest of the world that “Whedon = money.”  Their dickery with Firefly got them a movie and fuck, Serenity took in $10.1 million its first week.  It didn’t make back its budget until it was put out on DVD.  Whedon doesn’t mean bank and if Dollhouse is another primetime failure, maybe the bullshit aura of “genius” and “competency” surrounding Joss Whedon will finally dissipate enough for meth-riddled Fox execs to understand that he’s just a hackneyed fantasy pillock.  Fucker needs to get past the first year to prove he can hang on the big networks.

And I’ll put money down.  Even in this shitty economy, the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie will make three times Serenity’s opening gate its debut week, and that’s a cautious/chickenshit wager.

Originally I was going to review The Jon Dore Television Show (The Comedy Network: Wednesday, 10:00 PM ET/PT) a day before the premiere.  In typical me fashion, I flaked on the review.  It’s a thing that I do occasionally.

There hasn’t been much press about The Jon Dore Television Show’s second season anyway.  A few mainstream interviews have appeared in newspapers.  The usual condemnations of the show exist.  Dore isn’t exactly Russell Peters in terms of popularity.

The Jon Dore Television Show knows Jon Dore isn’t a great actor.  His deadpan persona is milked effectively for comedy.  JDTS takes the basic premise of The Sarah Silverman Program. – unlikable protagonist goes through a life issue every episode – and splices it with a TLC documentary.  This conceit actually works, even though there is no way it should.

The second-season premiere of The Jon Dore Television Show, “Jon Fights Discrimination,” features feminist Judy Rebick, media professor Marion Coomey and microbiologist Chris Liu.  They all intersect with Dore’s campaign to end discrimination, a quest borne of Dore having to pay to get into a bar on Ladies’ Night.

Dore does his part to end discrimination by dressing up as a fat, blind, Asian black woman with red hair and a snake for a tail.  Somehow, the show progresses from this to Dore dressing his neighbours up in white bodystockings while he rants on about creating a “pure race of people.”  Some of the jokes in “Jon Fights Discrimination” fall flat, such as a running joke involving black centaurs, but I found Dore as the ultimate minority amusing.

“Jon Gets Horny” continues the comedy trend set by “Jon Fights Discrimination.”  This time, Dore has a constant erection and needs to get rid of it.  Dore talks sex with his aunt Kathy Layton, who is a registered nurse.  He also interviews sex addiction expert “Mike” and “Sex Industy Expert” Kedra Alliard.

Psychotherapist Susan Lynne, who guested as herself several times in the first season, makes her first appearance of the second season here.  She is to JDTS what Chef was to South Park, a voice of reason that Dore plays off of.

Compared to “Jon Fights Discrimination,” “Jon Gets Horny” is comedically limp.  In one week, the show has gone from satirizing the media to making fun of cam whores.  Too many of the jokes in “Jon Gets Horny” are variations on the “Jon humps inanimate object” theme, which is not good.

The Jon Dore Television Show will probably stay a cult item by the end of its second season.  The show’s format is such that it would easily fall apart in the wrong hands.  I’m curious to know how long Dore can keep the show going before it collapses like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.  As long as JDTS is funny at least some of the time, I’ll keep watching.