For the love of God, is he really writing about "Arrested Development" again?

OK, I am. I'll admit it. And the show's not even on the air right now, taking a hiatus while Fox runs the rest of the baseball season. (It's back on Oct. 31, and you'd better tune in, you ungrateful bastards.) But I've got two things to say about this, the finest show on the air today. If you don't want to read them, why not swing over to Rosie's blog and see what sort of illiterate gibberish she's peddling in the form of empowering blank verse.

Still here? Good. First thing: I've watched just about the entire second season of the show (So sue me: I got a review copy and had a week off. What would you do?) and I'd like to report it's even better the second time around. Everyone excels in their parts (including Michael Sera and Alia Shawkat as might-be-cousins George Michael and Maeby, two characters I'd didn't fully appreciate on my first pass of the show. Sera, by the way, played the young Chuck Barris in CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, one of my favorite films of recent years. Not that you care, Rosie fans! Do you? Do you?)


But my pick for top character remains G.O.B., as played by Will Arnett. Season 2 was an especially rich one for him: He re-teamed with his old ventriloquist dummy Franklin (shown above) and tried to bridge the gap between the races (and failed). He snuck into the private magician's club The Gothic Castle (or, as one character mispronounced it in a clip I can't believe the Fox censors missed, the Gothic Asshole) armed with only the Sword of Destiny. And he got married, sort of, to a woman he couldn't remember (though he kept mentioning, hopefully, that she had "big cans"). She was played by Arnett's real-life wife Amy Poehler, and humiliated him in a spoof of those Abu Gihrab photos. (GOB, naturally, didn't realize he was being humilated.) But the coolest thing about GOB? It's the way that, whenever he does a magic trick, a brief snippet of the old Europe song "The Final Countdown" plays. Even if the "trick" is nothing more than him tearing off his stripper-style pants for no logical reason.

The second reason I'm writing yet again about ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT is to point you to a Web site that will stun you into submission with the sheer volume of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT-related material jammed into its bandwidth. It's THE BALBOA OBSERVER-PICAYUNE, and it has so much information that I'll bet you could re-watch seasons 1 and 2 on DVD and not spend as much time as it would take you to go through this site. Episodes guides? Sure. Photos? You bet. (Hundreds -- literally -- from each episode). Cast bios, sound clips and message boards? Oh yeah, but that's amateur stuff. How about sketches of characters by big-name comic book artists, like this portrait of Lucille by my pal Jill Thompson? How about a "bluthcyclopedia," with hundreds of entries covering everything from "Big Yellow Joint" to "Senor Tadpoles"? How about a "shop" section featuring everything from the ill-fated Bluth family Cornballer to the complete series of "Girls With Low Self Esteem" videos. Obsessive? Of course it is. But how else can you celebrate a show that is itself so obsessive that it would include a clue to what I'm guessing is a major upcoming plot twist in a shot that's onscreen for a second or two at most?

To paraphrase Ron Howard, the brilliant narrator (and, incidentally, co-producer) of the show, "Now that's how you do a Web site!"