First day of Term 2 today. As well as lecturing this morning, this afternoon I had time to start thinking about a paper in response to a call from Velvet Light Trap – on failures and flops. I’m keen to write something about Arrested Development. Personally I thought it was a great show that, in Australia at least, never got the timeslot it deserved. However, it’s interesting for other reasons as well. Although it was a critical success winning many awards, it never gained more than a niche audience and the network gradually decreased the number of episodes as the three seasons progressed. Until finally it was cancelled. For a program that was fast, witty and fitted into the fashion for mockumentary style sitcoms, it’s difficult at first glance to understand why it didn’t gain more of an audience. Do sitcom audiences really want the same old formula? Maybe – Everybody Loves Raymond I’m looking at you. But then Seinfeld wasn’t the same old formula and it proved to be a blockbuster. Maybe Arrested Development came too soon after Seinfeld’s demise – landing right in the middle of the fashion for murder, detective, forensics in which television seemed to be awash a few years ago. Sitcoms in any form aren’t really the current flavour of the television month. Are mockumentaries destined never to attract anything more than a niche audience? In Australia, Summer Heights High seemed to prove that wrong – consistently winning it’s timeslot. But then we are a much smaller television market than the US. Are niche audiences all that’s left in our multi-channel television landscape? Working Dog’s new series The Hollowmen looks like it’s trying to do for federal politics what SHH did for education. We’ll see if it has a similar appeal – perhaps it will prove more cerebral than Chris Lilley’s comedy of sometimes cruelty. Politics might also be less palatable to the school age audiences of Summer Heights. Time will tell. With it’s fast moving script perhaps audiences found AR too “cerebral”, but then it also had a delightful sense of the visually ridiculous (the stair car, the banana stand, the segway and so on and so forth). I’m undecided on all these questions, but I did start looking for reviews and critiques of Arrested Development this afternoon – finding some interesting news articles as starters.