This past week, Jason Bateman did an interview on Marc Maron's podcast WTF. It's a good listen and I would definitely recommend it, as Bateman has had an interesting career path, going from child star to teen idol to a decade of semi-self-imposed obscurity to critic sitcom darling to comedy movie star. Check it out here. He says some hilarious things about Horrible Bosses 2!
If you know me, you know that Arrested Development is maybe my all-time favourite show. Right up there with The Wire. I know that those are basically the most obvious choices in terms of comedy and drama shows, but fuck it. Those are my favourites and this my blog and that's the way it is and if you don't like it you git out.
The Pet-Sounds-is-my-favourite-album-of-all-time-ness of my taste in television aside, Arrested Development really does mean a lot to me. In high school I noticed that Bomb the Music Industry! made a lot of references to the show, specifically on Goodbye Cool World (though my linked example is from Album Minus Band) which was a huge album for me at that time and really the soundtrack to the summer of 2006, so I figured I would check the show out. This was of course after the show had already ended, so the way I was introduced to show was through re-runs shown by the CBC back-to-back at 5 and 5:30 on weekdays. I still didn't really get what was so amazing about the show, but there was a lot about it that I didn't understand at that time and that really drew me in.
I gave the show another shot in first year university and promptly bought the series on DVD. That has really proved to be one of my best purchases as it gave me an avenue to watch the show before Netflix and everything being immediately available for streaming on the internet. I introduced a ton of people to the show and me getting to watch the slow process of them realizing just how smart and funny the show was something that I never got tired of. It's my most-watched TV show by a wide margin and has a high degree of re-watchability.
Sure were a lot of hyphens in that paragraph. I'll try to refrain for the rest of this post.
This podcast brought up a lot of feelings for me regarding Arrested Development and one in particular.
In second year university I went through my first break-up and it hit me pretty hard. I had been let down by people before that and I felt depressed before that but never like the way I experienced at that time. I had a lot of very strong emotions that I didn't know how to deal with and I had a very low sense of self-worth. I ascribed everything wrong in my life to myself and blamed myself for everything and I felt like everything was going badly and it was completely my fault and because of that I was a shitty and useless person.
Sidenote: Those feelings are what inspired me to start good ol' IMU here.
During this period of depression, I was re-watching Arrested Development for the first time. It was still just as funny as the first time and I was amazed that there were still loads of jokes that I had missed the first time around. It felt great because I could get out of my own head and laugh for 20 minutes at a time and not worry about the other things in my life. Arrested Development was so so helpful to me in coping with my terrible headspace at the time. I would think to myself at that time "It's just a TV show I like, it's not like I'm actually depending on it." trying to minimize the role that the show played in my life at the time because the fact that I was relying on a TV show that heavily made me insecure.
But you what? Fuck it. If you're going through a trying time in your life and something, anything, is helping you in a healthy way, there is no shame in admitting that. None whatsoever. Don't be ashamed of what you like and why you like. Anything can beautiful depending on how you look at it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment