I guess now that Arrested Development, the brilliant ensemble comedy about an oddball family and their internecine warfare, has won just about every Emmy award it was nominated for (Best Comedy Series, Best Comedy Writing, Best Comedy Directing), Fox can go ahead and cancel it. During its entire first season, which comes out on DVD in a few weeks, viewers of Arrested Development were kept in a state of perpetual doubt, both that a network sitcom could actually be this funny and that the show would garner enough viewers to keep it afloat in a sea of vacuous reality stunt-programming. Happily, it looks like Fox's patience may indeed pay off. That is if the "Emmy-winning" prefix can convince more of the Everybody Loves Raymond crowd to tune in and give Jason Bateman, Jessica Walter, Will Arnett, Jeffrey Tambor, and the rest of the superlative cast a try.

Harold Check