Recapturing Greatness

With news that Fox is close to greenlighting a pilot that would team Will Arnett up with former Arrested Development co-creator and executive producer Mitch Hurwitz (as well as AD co-executive producer Jim Vallely, who wrote the scripts for some great episodes, including “Pier Pressure,” “Righteous Brothers,” and “S.O.B.s”), the big (and sometimes insularly arrogant) Arrested Development fans here at NPI couldn’t help but get a bit excited. After all, the news that Arnett will be playing “a rich Beverly Hills jackass” sounds more than a little Gob Bluth-esque.

At the same time, we’d probably be better off to cool our expectations. The post-Arrested Development career of Will Arnett has been filled with plenty of flops (The Brothers Solomon, Let’s Go to Prison) and only a few mild successes (his guest appearance on Parks & Recreation, Blades of Glory). Even his previous reunion with Hurwitz, the animated series Sit Down, Shut Up (which included fellow AD alums Jason Bateman and Henry Winkler) was a mild disaster, lasting only 13 episodes.

Monday Medley

What we read while reconnecting with our Buddhist roots…

• The Tea Party has been a hot topic of late, and not just at NPI. David Barstow of The New York Times wrote an in-depth piece on the group, as did Ben McGrath at The New Yorker. George Will is dubious of populism’s advantages to the Republican Party, and Kurt Andersen of New York thinks our democracy is too democratic. But populism and the Tea Party seem to be energizing the conservative movement, and motivating Sarah Palin to keep saying stupid things, and exploiting her retarded son for publicity.

• Speaking of fucking idiots who some people inexplicably trust as some kind of authority, Donald Trump doesn’t think global warming is real. Since, you know, it snowed a lot recently. Because that kind of logic is airtight. Political cartoonists have also harvested this hilariously ironic gold mine. A lot.

• Tim swears he wrote his ode to curling long before Dan Wetzel and Rick Reilly did their own. And that he hasn’t spent his entire weekend honing his strategy and touch curling online. (By the way, Reilly’s piece is notable for his characteristically condescending portrait of the typical American sports fan via an italicized interlocutor. Nobody disrespects the device of interlocutor as frequently and as frustratingly as Richard Reilly.)

• If you want serious Winter Olympic reporting, you have to turn to Deadspin, where Tommy Craggs rightfully took the International Luge Federation, Canadian Luge Association, and IOC to task for not doing what was necessary to prevent the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. But don’t worry, it’s not like even the experienced, former-medal-winning lugers think the track is still dangerous or anything.

• One grassroots movement to be happy about, though, was the apparently successful movement to prevent EMI from selling Abbey Road Studios.

• Chris Jones’s profile of Roger Ebert has rightfully been getting a lot of positive coverage. Here is Roger Ebert himself on the piece. If Jones’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because either A. it’s a really common name or B. you remember hearing how he won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing last year with his epic piece, “The Things That Carried Him.”

• NPI favorite Joe Posnanski writes a very compelling piece on why Frank Thomas is a no-questions-asked first ballot Hall of Famer. His reaction to Tiger Woods’ apology, meanwhile, was only compelling–not very.