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Can This Man Save the Sitcom?: "Arrested Development," Mitchell Hurwitz's genre-busting show, could revitalize the tired TV form. All it needs is
an audience. (ARI POSNER, 8/01/04, NY Times)

TWO weeks ago, the little-watched Fox sitcom "Arrested Development" pulled off a remarkable Emmy coup: it walked away with seven nominations, including best comedy series, best writing and best direction. Just a few nights later, the show took top honors from the Television Critics Association for best new program and best comedy. "It's been a crazy period of approbation," said Mitchell Hurwitz, the show's creator and one of its executive producers, last week in his office on the Fox lot. "Before you know it, I'll be caught smuggling mushrooms through security at Burbank Airport," he joked, referring to the infamous drug bust that befell the Emmy-winning writer Aaron Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing," several years ago.

The honors represent more than just a compliment for Mr. Hurwitz's innovative, genre-busting show. They may be its last, best hope for survival. For all its acclaim, "Arrested Development" is barely hanging on. The series — which stars Jason Bateman as the only sane member of an Orange County family that loses its real estate fortune in an Enron-type scandal — finished its first season as only the 120th most popular show (88th among viewers 18 to 49), with a meager average weekly audience of 6.2 million people. And despite Fox's efforts to cultivate new fans by broadcasting reruns this summer on Sundays at 8:30 p.m., "Arrested Development" consistently loses about a quarter of the audience from "The Simpsons," which precedes it. "An Emmy would be nice," Mr. Hurwitz said, sighing, "but I'd settle for an audience."

Ordinarily, he wouldn't get the chance to find one. But these are not ordinary times for TV comedy. The sitcom is in crisis. The overwhelming majority fail in their first season; among the few that became hits over the last decade, "Friends" and "Frasier" ended this year. Increasingly, they are being replaced by far less expensive reality shows like "Average Joe" and "Wife Swap" — funny, yes, but not for the right reasons. Launching a successful sitcom, Daily Variety recently declared, "is harder than trying to sell buggy whips in the age of the automobile."

It's in this era of long odds that Fox has decided to roll the dice on "Arrested Development." After a tense couple of months last spring when the show faced cancellation, the network has declared its full support, not only picking the show up for a full 22-episode season that starts Nov. 7 but moving it from 9:30 p.m. to the plum time slot right after "The Simpsons." "Its creative integrity and groundbreaking nature are all things we look for on Fox," Gail Berman, Fox's entertainment president, told reporters at the network's annual presentation in New York. "We hope to see it build in the same vein as `Seinfeld' and `Everybody Loves Raymond' " — two hit shows that took a while to catch on.

Of course, the network said much the same thing before canceling shows like "Undeclared" and "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" — and those shows had stronger numbers. But Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, Fox's parent, is adamant. "We're going to give it every possible chance," he insisted in a recent conversation.

The couples times we've noticed it was on it was very funny, but who can remember which night, time, and network that is? It has to become a problem for the networks eventually that you just assume you can buy the whole season on DVD and watch it a few months from now.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2004 8:24 AM