Arrested development

you've touched on something, Robert, very profound.

It's like arrested development.

Look, I'm just going to use Robert De Niro as an example.

I think he's 82 now, 83, something like that.

Jeff, Robert in Maine hit the nail on the head.

It's called institutionalized adolescence.

It's the same as arrested development.

Liberals are crazy, and most don't know it.

And we're talking about Caleb specifically and these types of characters in these religious settings.

So many of them seem to have this arrested development about them where they are very much adolescent.

They're doing exactly what you said.

They're very needy.

And so I think one essential element is obviously the cast, as we've been saying, the three main filmmakers, Todd Phillips, Adam McKay, and Judd Apatow.

But then also this sense of like arrested development is a crucial part of the core frat pack movies that these are men in a stage of their life between youth and becoming a full adult and having a family often.

They're men that are specifically forced to pass through a life stage sort of unwillingly.

And like the movie is kind of often about that.

Old school, a movie about misfit men who find each other and befriend each other in early adulthood.

Pineapple Express, trying to articulate the feelings towards your drug dealer.

dodgeball has a bit of that old school streak to wedding crashers largely about the relationship between john and ryan our second theme here that i want to talk about just like the concept of arrested development because when i had first started tracing this frat pack movie i had originally envisioned it as the timeline of the movies kind of perfectly maps to the significant life events of the gen x generation right so it's like You got Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks in like the late 90s, 2000s, high school, college, old school, which is about wanting to go back to college.

Wedding Crashers, you know, about when all your friends are getting married, your 20s and 30s.

The mind of a student activist.

He's got arrested development, hasn't he, Andy Burnham? His mind sort of stopped when he was, what, 15 or 16.

Someone told him, Thatcher's bad, Labour's good, Tory's bad, evil Mrs Thatcher.

He was told that when he was like 14, 15, 16, and his mind just went, click, that's it, that's all I need to know.

That's all I need to know about politics, is that Labour good, tax and spend, Mrs Thatcher was bad.

That's it.

Arrested Development.

It's got the mind of a child activist.

And yeah, I think it, again, shows how stunted a lot of the characters in this show are.

I mean, it's not just Dexter, who we've talked about with an arrested development, but Angel has a certain level of it.

Batiste, or excuse me, Masuka has a clear arrested development.

And I would say to a degree, LaGuerta has a bit of it.

So it's a lot of these various different characters all having these moments where they don't feel like they're fully matured yet either.

but you could put her in there if you had a specific example.

Right.

Well, I would say her inability to move beyond her relationship with her husband, right? We start seeing things changing in these episodes, but up to this point, she's, like, stuck, right? And so I'm just talking about not necessarily Arrested Development, but people are kind of in these suspended...

There are some serious mental shortcomings happening with the dickless morons who run around town pretending to be a cop.

I mean, why don't you just announce to the world that deep down you're still a seven-year-old? Arrested development, I think, is the word.

Uh, the term, Josh.

It is.

[laughs]

[laughs] I'd rather be the jack off guy, the neighborhood jack off guy in, in the papers than, than have my name in the papers for impersonating a cop.

So in Phoenix, Arizona, uh, the real cops are warning folks to look out for giant nerd arrested development fake cops.

Nerd's a good way to put it.

And I can really see that can really be like, oh, yeah, that guy desperately was clinging to what he had, but he was also really afraid.

Afraid of losing it, you know, pretty desperate and kind of stalled out in a little bit of arrested development, maybe.

Arrested development.

Yeah, that's a...

And I wonder, you know, I know as a professor, you're leading... you know, you're leading in your, in the seminary, you're leading students.

Why, what's wrong with her present location?

She's right across the aisle from a case of walking Arrested Development called Walter Denton.

[laughs]

Their very proximity has fostered an infantile romance culminating in Harriet's receiving a series of mushy, ridiculous poems.