And now the story of an acclaimed comedy that got canceled, and the streaming service that had no choice but to put it back together—it’s Arrested Development
Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Sunday, May 26. All times are Eastern.
TOP PICK
Arrested Development (Netflix, midnight): Why are you reading? Don’t you know 15 new episodes of Arrested Development went live at the same time as this article? Did you not know, and having just read those first two sentences, just clicked over to Netflix? Or are you reading this at 8 a.m., having just shotgunned the whole “fourth season” in a single sitting like Mitch Hurwitz told you not to? (Did you want him to be—explicit?) For those of you who’ve chosen to binge, Todd VanDerWerff will have a review as soon as he recovers from this insane Sunday; working through the show at a more leisurely pace, Noel Murray and Erik Adams will have the first of their two-episodes-a-week writeups on Wednesday.
REGULAR COVERAGE
Smash (NBC, 9 p.m.): As The Village People once suggested to Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner, you can’t stop the music—unless everyone long ago turned the music into jokes about scarves, peanut allergies, and poorly deployed character deaths, in which case NBC is perfectly within its rights to stop the music. With Smash unlikely to follow in Arrested Development’s phoenix-like flight path, Todd VanDerWerff sounds off on the show one last time.
Mad Men (AMC, 10 p.m.): Joan marks the unofficial start of summer with a trip to the beach—a luxury that television will not afford Todd VanDerWerff.
The Borgias (Showtime, 10 p.m.): Plagues, however, do not take a holiday, and with Game Of Thrones making way for Liberace, The Borgias is your main source of castle-bound mayhem this Sunday. Les Chappell wishes his brother George were here to see this.
WHAT ELSE IS ON?
Marvel’s Avengers Assemble (Disney XD, 11 a.m.): It’s a good thing that possessive is at the front of this show’s title, otherwise we might come to the conclusion that we assigned Oliver Sava to cover a cartoon about the band that recorded “We Are The One.” (Not that we wouldn’t watch an animated series about the San Francisco punk scene of the 1970s…)
Behind The Candelabra (HBO, 9 p.m.): In attempt to prove Liberace’s notion that “Too much of a good thing is wonderful” applies totally applies to television, Todd VanDerWerff is also your man for thoughts on Steven Soderbergh’s glitz-and-surgically-removed-warts-and-all Liberace biopic.
Rock My RV (Travel, 9 p.m.): If the RV’s rockin’, Bret Michaels has come a-knockin’—with the intention of unskinny bopping some beat-up recreational vehicles into gaudy monstrosities worthy of a vintage Poison video.
Mermaids: The New Evidence (Animal Planet, 10 p.m.): Last year, Animal Planet notched its highest-ever ratings (Higher than any Puppy Bowl!) with the mockumentary Mermaids: The Body Found. This year, it presents an encore presentation of that program, appended by this special, the “evidence” from which we’re hoping is just a clamshell-cased VHS copy of The Little Mermaid.
Happy Gilmore (MTV, 8 p.m.): Look, it’s a long weekend: If you don’t tell anybody we warmed up for Mad Men with the movie where Adam Sandler plays golf in order to bail Mrs. Tremond from Twin Peaks out of a nursing home (winning the affection of Claire Dunphy along the way), we won’t tell anyone you did the same.
Clueless (Nickelodeon, 9 p.m.): Though if you must watch a mid-’90s comedy this evening, you’d be totally buggin’ not to pick Amy Heckerling’s Jane Austen adaptation for the galleria set. (It’s aged much better than any facet of Happy Gilmore that isn’t Julie Bowen.)
Indianapolis 500 (ABC, 2 p.m.): The Brickyard’s signature race marks its 97th running, encompassing enough times around Indianapolis Motor Speedway to necessitate 16 oil changes.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Sanjay And Craig (Nickelodeon, 10:30 a.m.): The comedic adventures of a boy and his snake (voiced by Maulik Pancholy and Chris Hardwick, respectively) hits a surrealist vein untapped since the early days of SpongeBob SquarePants. And with links to The Adventures Of Pete & Pete, there’s no way Marah Eakin wasn’t giving this pilot an “A.”