Why I don't care about an "Arrested Development" movie, even though I love "Arrested Development"

1. It's simply too late. At this point, the show has been off the air for longer than it was ever on the air. Even if they started production tomorrow, a movie wouldn't be hitting theaters for AT LEAST 18 months or so. What makes anybody think that something made so long after the end of the show would even be any good? At that point it's not a continuation, it's a reunion, the type of cheap, cynical stunt that I would think fans of Arrested Development would mock.

2. The series finale was a perfectly good ending. It not only wrapped up pretty much every loose thread (although it's been a while since I've seen it, so let me know if I'm forgetting anything), but it was explicitly designed as a mirror image of the pilot episode, or the completion of a circle. Anything else is going to be sort of a sideways tangent at best (like reissuing Thriller with bonus tracks) or an infuriating legacy-stainer at worst (like the fourth Indiana Jones movie).

3. Arrested Development's pace and tone won't translate to a movie. A feature-length film would be roughly the length of at least four sitcom-length TV episodes. I know as well as anybody that Arrested Development is one of the most endlessly re-watchable shows ever made (maybe second to The Simpsons), but have you ever watched four in a row, with no breaks? It's a tiring experience. The 21 minute sitcom is the perfect format for a show with such breakneck pacing. Stretch it out to an hour and a half, with no commercial breaks or breaks between episodes, and it's either going to have slow stretches in the middle just to break things up for the viewer and pad out the length (like the Simpsons movie) or it will be so frantically paced that by the end nobody will be able to pay attention and the plot will seem too nonsensical and convoluted (like the Futurama DVD movies).

So there's that. I promise that sooner or later I'm going to write about something I like, instead of whining about how everything sucks. So far the Tom Smash Blog rebirth has consisted of thoughts that wouldn't fit into facebook updates, so this is what we've got to work with.