As much as we love Arrested Development, we just can't get that into the new stuff due to its... disjointed development. Digital delivery holds the promise of bringing small time, lower budget productions to large audiences, but those productions also tend to be edgier, riskier, and more adventurous. Combine that edginess with the wide-open possibilities of the on-demand digital frontier, and you risk a level of self-indulgence that would make Lindsay Fünke blush. It's a match made in Sudden Valley. In the case of A.D., they started down the zany path of "watch 'em in any order" only to abandon that at the last minute. That sounds like something the Bluth family might do, and while we applaud the show creators' efforts to feel their characters, we wished they didn't. That ever-tumbling plot-orientation of yesterday's A.D. was replaced with an explosion of disconnected mini-biopics. They each go in their own direction and leave us not with a burning desire to find out WHAT THE HELL WILL HAPPEN NEXT?! but with a burning desire to shrug and shake our heads. Netflix, next time you take on a gifted show, make sure you don't let your new media strangeness mess with their mojo.
