Within thirty-six hours of the release of the long-awaited fourth season of Arrested Development, reviews—not just of the first episode, but of the entire season—started appearing online. Reviewers watched the full eight-hour season in one or two sleep-deprived binges, then spent the remaining twenty-eight hours spewing out essay-like things, some in excess of 3,000 words, purporting to offer an authoritative viewpoint on the show. One gets the sense that many of these writers would proudly refer to their essay-like things as thinkpieces, which is internet shorthand for unfocused, poorly edited conglomerations of words designed to project the appearance of depth without actually providing any.

So I’m at the gym and one of the TVs is tuned to Fox News, which I choose to watch because the other options are all reality TV shows about the hardships of blandly pretty rich white women, and at least the blandly pretty rich white people on Fox have the theoretical potential to talk about something important, and anyway I don’t need to justify this part of the decision. It was on. I was watching it.