22
Feb
Posted by John S in Uncategorized. Tagged: Arrested Development, brilliant comics, Comedy, comedy disaster, Fox, Gob Bluth, great comics doing unfunny things, Henry Winkler, Jason Bateman, jerry seinfeld, Jim Vallely, Mitch Hurwitz, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, seinfeld, Shut Up, Sit Down, the demise of The Office, the demise of the simpsons, The Office (UK), the Seinfeld curse, The Simpsons, Will Arnett. 3 comments
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. Continue reading →
31
Dec
Posted by Tim in Aught Lang Syne, Culture, Film, Literature, Politics, Sports, TV. Tagged: 16 seeds winning, a lot of authors have the first name jonathan these days, alan moore adaptations, Avatar, barack obama and hope, barenaked ladies, chad ochocinco and the hall of fame, dwyane wade, j.d. salinger, James Cameron, kevin durant, lebron james, lebron's free agency, nba rivalries, nfl strike/lockout, nolan brothers v. coen brothers, philip roth, rickey henderson's hall of fame speech, Sarah Palin, soarin, st. louis rams as team of the teens, the arrested development movie, the demise of the simpsons, the end of the bcs, the end of the simpsons, the expansion of the youtube canon, the great american novel, the iraq war, the serial novel, tim tebow, tyler hansbrough, yankees' comuppance. 8 comments
In the Teens, I’m looking forward to…

…the career arc of LeBron James.
As of right now, the basketball populace seems more sure that LeBron James is the Player of the Next Decade than that Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan or Shaquille O’Neal is the Player of This One. We know that LeBron James is phenomenal now and that he will only continue to get better. But we still don’t know the extent of that improvement or where it will take place. Will James stick with his hometown Cavaliers or spurn them and become the most significant free-agent signing in sports history? If the latter, is it for the bright lights and crappy teammates of Madison Square Garden? The allure of eclipsing Jordan in Chicago? Or teaming up with Wade in Miami or Durant in, gasp, Oklahoma City?
This last question leads to the next one: Who will be James’s primary rival? Will Wade or Durant or Carmelo Anthony raise their games to the required levels to consistently compete with LeBron? Or will he, like Jordan, be too far above them to even be compared to another individual?
LeBron James will be the most culturally significant athlete of the Teens; it’s all a matter of how and where.
Continue reading →