Arrested Development - Too Soon

I said I wouldn't, but I've gotten into Arrested Development since G4 started showing the reruns. They run a different episode two or three times a day, sometimes it's the same one and sometimes there are two; the one shown late at night and early in the afternoon is usually the same.

I have said many times before that I did not get into the series when it first aired. I tried -- pretty hard, in fact -- several times over. FOX even ran some "mini-marathons" (2-hour blocks) of it right before it was canceled and I watched those for about a month, but it just didn't "take." There were too many characters and it skipped through storylines too quickly for me to get a handle on anything. That's why Arrested Development would have been the perfect, truly integrated Internet TV show...

At the beginning of every episode, there's a quick montage of what happened last time that gets you caught up on each character's plots, as well as the overall plot of the story up to now. But unless you are already familiar with the characters and history, it really doesn't tell you much.

The pilot episode is actually the only, real establishment for the entire rest of the series' run; if you missed that, you have only the barest of ideas as to what is going with whom and why. And everything that happens ties together, either with what has happened before or what is about to happen, or both. That's the series' real "schtick," or gimmick, in fact.

And it's brilliant, if you have seen all the episodes -- doubly so if you catch them in order from the start -- but it's not one of those shows you can just drop-in on. If you had a menu you could access at anytime across the screen, with full character bios (up to the episode you are watching) including all the plotlines they're involved in and a brief rundown of their relationships to and with one another, Arrested Development would have been the huge hit everyone (and with whom I now agree) kept saying it should have been.

I've never had WebTV, but I understand it works nothing like this, anyway. Still, with onscreen Guides becoming so advanced, I wonder how long it will take to achieve this level of sophistication.

I'd also like something along the lines of TrailFire for the TV -- something like Pop-Up Video, where little info bubbles come up with each character. You could change it to work whenever the character is in the scene, or toggle it with a button, or turn it on and off like the commentary on a DVD.