Arrested Development’s quiet return shows how radically TV has changed in five years
In an overcrowded TV landscape, it’s hard for any show to stand out. Some series, like Netflix’s heavily promoted Everything Sucks!, come and go after a single season. Others linger quietly under the radar year after year, like The Path, which completed a three-season run on Hulu in March, not that many seemed to notice. Maybe you watched and loved these shows. Maybe you know someone else who did. But whether they’re short-lived or strangely enduring, many shows lack the qualities that make them worthy social media fodder and fandom bait, the 2018 equivalent of water cooler conversation topics: they exist without seeming to matter.
It’s a tough environment even for beloved, buzzed-about shows that are returning after a considerable...