Monday, October 1, 2012

Arrested Development: The Novelization

The first two chapters of the Google narrative set up the background for Arrested Development. Chapter One contains all the information you could ever want about, "an American television sitcom created by Mitchell Hurwitz for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The show centers on the Bluth family..." thanks to our faithfully know-it-all friend, Wikipedia.Then, in Chapter TwoIMDb teaches us more about our cast of characters. "Level-headed son Michael Bluth takes over family affairs after his father is imprisoned. But the rest of his spoiled, dysfunctional family are making..." All this background has me dying to dive right in. Ready?

Chapter Three contains an unexpected turn of events. We find from Arrested Development Music that "in celebration of their 20th year anniversary, Arrested Development will be performing many dates across the USA beginning in September and continuing..." An odd surprise to throw at us so early in the book, but surprises are good, right? We'll come back to this later. 


Chapter Four takes us to a place where novels have not yet dared to go- video! It reads, simply, "Watch Arrested Development online | Free | Hulu Watch Arrested Development free online. Stream episodes and clips of Arrested Development instantly." From here, we can dispense with all this pesky reading and rot our brains in front of some moving pictures. That's not the only non-novelistic surprise Google has for us though- Chapter Five is made entirely of still images of the family. Looks like they have family portraits taken quite often, huh?


Words make a comeback in Chapter Six, as TV.com gives us more background. "The Emmy Award-winning comedy series ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT revolves around MICHAEL BLUTH (Jason Bateman), the "normal" one in a family of crazies, who..." Fine, we get it. Michael is soooooo great. Why do you keep bragging about him, and why are we just now hearing about this Emmy Award?


Chapter Seven looks to the future: Why Arrested Development on Netflix could change everything... Fascinating! What else? "As plans for Arrested Development's return spread, many details indicate that thanks to Netflix, the popular cult series has the opportunity to not..." But, wait- when did this happen? We'll get the news that launched this news later.


Chapter 8, brought to us by Balboa Observer-Picayune: An Arrested Development Fan Site gives us more of that broad and fascinating background information we've been craving, this time from a source no one recognizes! "A fansite for the FOX TV show Arrested Development with everything you've ever wanted to know about the Bluth family." Hooray!


Finally, a chance to buy something. Chapter Nine gives us a place to purchase the videos we watched for free in Chapter Four, but this time we get to wait for physical disks to be delivered to our homes. Uh, thanks, I guess, Amazon. We did get something new from them though- vague testimonial. "Season One: Winner of the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy its first year out,Arrested Development is the kind of sitcom that gives you hope for television." Wow, that really makes me want to buy and wait for something I could see for free immediately.


In Chapter 10, we learn more about the music via the most relevant website ever, MySpace. "ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT's official profile including the latest music, albums, songs, music videos and more updates." Does this really belong here?



  1. Chapter 11: We've already heard why Arrested Development on Netflix is great, so here's the announcement from the LA Times that new episodes of the show will be aired exclusively on Neflix. Great. Now Chapter Seven makes more sense. Wow. That was a great ending.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I love that you had your narrative literally separated into chapters (Ch. 1, 2, 3, etc.). This made it fun and really easy to read! I wish I had done something like this too with mine. It seems like Google worked out perfectly for your topic! I love how it started, with Wikipedia and IMDB giving us a friendly introduction to Arrested Development. From there I liked all the fun "turns" your novel too, including a dive into video through Hulu! Chapter seven and eleven tied together quite nicely! This was a fun assignment, and a topic like yours proved to work out very nicely for what was assigned. I actually learned a lot about Arrested Development while reading this, so that proves that you did a really good job! :)

Shirley S Page said...

I also like the chapter headings of your narrative. Your quirky commentary made me want to keep reading and I actually felt like looking up the book (that doesn't actually exist) so I could read the full story. I guess clicking on the links will do that, right? I also love how you made the quick note to the link provided by Google a part of the narrative. This made the actual links appealing and my desire to click on them stronger. I really enjoyed your posts.

Branden said...

So here is what I found interesting...

I browsed some of the other class blogs, and it looks like most of them followed the same format (for this assignment) as the first person who posted on their blog. Does that make sense? In our case, Shirley posted first with a specific format (links in the text, broad overview of narrative), and the rest of us just went ahead and followed that format. Looking at the other team blogs, the same kind of thing happened--one person posted a specific way, then the rest followed. So, I don't know what that means, or if it is even significant, but it was interesting to me. Haha.

Anyway, like the others mentioned, I liked your chapter headings. Looks like you really put some thought into this one. Also, as I brosed the other team blogs, I noticed that most of them that had anything to do with TV or actors had IMDB and wikipedia in their top results (obviously). These are both massive databases in and of themselves. When I am browsing these two sites, I often find myself creating my own little narrative by how I surf them. Like, I will link between subjects and actors that have something to do with each other. Kind of like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon... discovering all these new connections.

I swear that makes a lot more sense in my mind.

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