I am – Hercules!!
“Arrested Development” gets no respect.
“Desperate Housewives” won the best-TV-comedy Golden Globe two years in a row. The Emmys’ pick this year was “Everybody Loves Raymond.” “Veronica Mars” got five times as many votes as “Arrested” in E!’s “Save Our Show” poll this time last year.
This season Fox moved it to Mondays, where it performed so poorly (losing to the likes of “Wife Swap,” “Surface,” “The King of Queens” and “7th Heaven”), Fox cut its order from 22 to 13 episodes and replaced it with repeats of “Prison Break” (which, to add insult to injury, actually garnered a bigger audience).
The bad news? Even though Fox hasn’t formally cancelled “Arrested,” its chances for renewal are virtually non-existent.
The good news? Pay channel Showtime is, by all accounts, prepared to order new “Arrested” episodes as soon as Fox officially kicks it out the door. Which means we can finally see Lindsay Bluth Fünke naked and Ron Howard can, as appropriate, begin referring to certain characters as “cunts.”
Tonight Fox devotes its entire prime-time slate to all four of the remaining unaired episodes. In the second half-hour, Justine Bateman turns up as Michael’s long-long sister. In the third, the Bluths descend upon Iraq, where they meet Saddam Hussein and discover there’s too much traffic on Halliburton Road. Judge Reinhold appears. And Richard Belzer, too, whom I’m guessing has found a way to play John Munch on yet another series.
8 p.m. Friday. Fox.
, including the first two seasons of “Arrested Development. Here’s how things stand as this is being typed: