Don’t get me wrong. Mitch Hurwitz‘s explanation for why you shouldn’t marathon the fourth season of Arrested Development, premiering on Netflix this Sunday, is really good. It’s just one I don’t expect many people already set on a binge to heed.
In an interview with Vulture Hurwitz gave some tips on watching the 15 new half-hour episodes, premiering at 12:01 a.m. PST (3 a.m. EST) on Sunday, May 26th. Primary among them: Try and take it easy, even if you’ve already set the day aside as one to be spent in an Arrested Development-induced coma. “You’ll get tired!,” said Hurwitz:
“One of the producers came by when I was in post-production recently, and he said, ‘Can I see some of them?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got seven episodes.’ ‘Great.’ And I heard him in the other room laughing and laughing, and then I heard him laughing a little less, and then a little less, and then later I saw him getting a drink of water and I said, ‘What do you think?’ He goes, ‘I’m just getting a little tired. I love it, it’s great, but you can’t really laugh the whole time. You have to take a break. There’s so much material… You can’t take it all in at once. It’s like the selective-attention test. The whole show is like the selective-attention test… Don’t feel obligated to watch it all at once. It’s a comedy! It’s not like Lord of the Rings. Comedy takes a lot out of you.”
What if you know full well that you lack the willpower to stop clicking “next episode” and extend the season over days, not hours? Hurwitz offers another piece of advice that’s easier to follow: Watch the episodes sequentially. That may seem obvious, but he previously said that the episodes all taking place at the same time means you can watch them in any order, only to discover in post-production that that just wasn’t true:
…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… [but] 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.”
Them’s the rules. Will you follow them? Or do you still plan on bingeing?
(via: Vulture)
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