Links of the week, 10/7/2011

This week: Arrested Development resurrection, delightful vocabulary words, and one of the best resoundingly negative reviews I’ve read in a long time. (The links are a bit scattershot this time. As you might be able to tell from, oh, the complete lack of posts since last Friday, I’ve had a busy week.)

• Earlier this week, I considered writing a post on my mixed feelings about the frenzied hype over a potential fourth season of Arrested Development, probably my favorite TV show of all time, but I figured that creator Mitchell Hurwitz has been talking this up for years and it hasn’t ever happened, so why would it happen now? Rumor now has it, though, that Netflix and Hulu are vying to stream a fourth season, so maybe it will happen. But would that really be a good thing? The series finale was so go-for-broke fearless, such a twisted reflection of the pilot, that a de facto epilogue seems unnecessary at best, and the plan to devote each episode to a single character is tremendously problematic. The heart of Arrested is the relationships among the Bluths, not the Bluths as individuals. Still, I’d totally watch, of course. (And clearly I should have just written the damn post. This is an abuse of the links of the week! Moving on!)
• Everything I’ve heard about the Anna Nicole opera, which debuted at England’s Royal Opera House earlier this year, is shockingly positive given the trashy subject matter. I don’t know what to make of this. I am both fascinated and repulsed. (Via Alex Ross.)
• Mental_floss‘s list of great words with no English equivalent features some truly delightful terms. Being particularly prone to Fremdschämen myself, I’m happy to have something to call it.
• The hideous blight of H8R has, thankfully, already been cancelled, but Daniel Fienberg’s thorough explication of just how wrong the show was on a fundamental level is still worth reading, lest we forget.