Resurrected TV Shows

Have been watching Arrested Development’s new season on Netflix. So far I’ve been enjoying it, although inevitably - Arrested Development being Arrested Development - there are moments that make me cringe. I found the whole first episode painful: Michael living in his son George Michael’s dorm room, apparently unable to understand that his son might not like this invasion of his privacy, and George Michael, who is used to shouldering his father’s emotional needs, unable to tell him.

It gets less painful and more funny after that, but it’s a rough first episode.

But I have to say, for me the most exciting thing about Netflix's resurrection of Arrested Development is the hope that they'll pick up other much-loved and maliciously-canceled TV shows. Veronica Mars, season 4, using the movie as a jumping off point for grown-up Veronica!

Not sure about this, on second thought. A reunion is the perfect excuse to get all our favorite characters back together for a movie, but there’s really no easy way to get most of them in town for a whole new TV season. Unless, like, they’re all still in Neptune. And I kind of hope Veronica has escaped Neptune by now. Maybe she, Logan, Mac, and Wallace have an apartment in...San Francisco or something?

(Speaking of the movie! My brother - we went halfsies on the kickstarter, so he gets all the newest VM news - says they’ve definitely signed Mac & Wallace. Yesssss.)

But back to Netflix shows: they could bring back everyone's favorite unjustly canceled show, Firefly! Though it's hard to know where it would go now that the big overarching mystery has been tied up in a bow. Although if we get to see Inara get it through to Mal that no really, you need to respect my boundaries, I have a cattle prod, that would be something.

And finally, in cloud-cuckoo land I would want a Wonderfalls resurrection- it deserves at least a proper ending! But I suspect that's too obscure and also has been off the air too long for its resurrection to be realistic. But maybe Pushing Daisies...that was only canceled a couple years ago, and it ran a respectable two seasons. The further adventures of Ned and Chuck (and Olive and Emerson) - that might be a possibility.

Imaginative sympathy

“Critique always aims to challenge the givenness of any starting-point, assumption, or range of reference, and usually to unmask the potentially sinister interests that are served by allowing any such starting-point to go unchallenged...

In much work done under this inspiration, there is a curious asymmetry in which the assumptions of the figures who are the objects of study are subjected to a much more severe regime than are the assumptions of the ones doing the studying. My recipe would be the opposite: extend the greatest possible imaginative sympathy to the expressions of the human agents we study, but combine it with the greatest possible skepticism about any of the explanatory mechanisms by means of which we try to account for their actions.”

- Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For?

I would like to scrawl this quote on my wall in black paint, a mission statement not only for understanding history but for writing stories, as well.