Sit Down, Shut Up...and Watch More Arrested Development

I'm throwing something out there: I like cartoons. This day in age, probably not such a stretch for someone my age to say that. What I like, though, aren't just the 80's Saturday morning cartoons that I watched as a kid or the adult cartoons. No, I'm talking about Looney Tunes, Tex Avery, Popeye, Hanna Barbera. The classics. What made them good, in my opinion, was precisely summed up by Tex Avery's motto: "In cartoons, anything can happen." Nowadays, I'm not so sure that's the idea. The vibe I get is that while the settings might be really inventive and different, anything that happens is kind of predictable.

In May of 2009, Mitch Hurwitz, the mastermind behind Arrested Development, tried to strike more Sunday night primetime gold on Fox, this time in its own domain: animation. So here we go...get the voices of a few funny cast members from AD, SNL, just add Kristin Chenoweth, then animate!

Mitch...you've made a huge mistake.

The fun thing about Arrested Development was that it made everyday life--family, work, love, and all their foibles--look like a cartoon. Take that kind of humor, actually put it in a cartoon, and you get a very average, pedestrian cartoon. It's like white on white. The humor blends in with the surroundings and becomes part of the background. Watch the show. You'll believe me! This is the primary failing of the show. Another downfall is that the style of animation is a bad fit for the writing, too. The choppy, inarticulate action might be great for a kids show, but as far as I'm concerned, Hurwitz's humor is very detailed and requires a medium that can convey as much of that as possible. This is not one of those mediums. Apocalyptic fail.