The Arrested Development season 3 premiere is tonight (8/7c on Fox). Please watch. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it before. Tape it. Don’t even work your schedule around it, because that might lead you to resent it before it even begins. And this would not bode well.

Clearly the development of my overwhelming obsession with this show is still chugging along just fine. Watching it always makes me feel creative and productive. (I’m aware that this makes no sense, but at this point I can’t do anything about it.) I have season 1 on DVD and every episode of season 2 stored in my DVR/life partner. With a small, highly exclusive AD-watching posse, I view them again and again and again, take a walk, get some pizza, and again.

Sometimes it’s fun to watch an episode multiple times in a row, choosing one character each time to watch the most closely. Lucille and Michael in particular make the funniest reaction faces. And as a general rule, like most everything else, AD parties are even funnier if you’re hungry (”craving a frozen banana”), thirsty (”Thank god they’ve got my brands here”), or high (”I’ll meet you down at the Big Yellow Joint”).

I know how hard it can be to start watching a new show, so I’ll type out a typical exchange between self-absorbed socialite Lucille Bluth and a person in the service industry — in this case, a plump and cheerful waitress at a cheesy chain restaurant called Klimpy’s:

Lucille (eyeing menu nervously): I’ll have the Ike & Tina Tuna.

Waitress: Plate or platter?

Lucille: I don’t understand the question, and I won’t respond to it.

Okay, actually the only reason I wrote that out was so I could mention an amazing discovery I made. I’m good at obsessing over little quirks about pop culture, but not so well versed in it that I can rattle off an actor’s working history. That’s just not how I roll. But get this: The same Klimpy’s waitress mentioned above is now a PTA mom in Showtime’s new series, Weeds. I can’t find her role on either show on IMDB, so I’m just going on faith… but I’m positive I’m right.

Sadly, the PTA woman is pretty nondescript and seems easily influenced by things Mary-Louise Parker says, so I doubt she’ll have much of a role on the show. I feel that this makes my discovery quite random and very impressive.

It’s gotten to the point where the majority of my socializing since I got back to New York has taken place in front of Arrested Development. I was going to write “with AD in the background,” but that’s completely inaccurate. The socializing has been the show. We gather, sit down, press play, and to be quite honest derive more amusement from checking out each other’s reactions to the lines than from actually speaking to each other. Let’s be honest. If I wanted to talk to these friends, I could text them or call their cells.

This weekend in a shocking upset, AD was temporarily phased out by HBO’s The Comeback. Since it started in June, I haven’t wanted to watch it because I didn’t like Friends. Real mature, Annie. I shouldn’t have been such a snob. This show and Lisa Kudrow are freaking genius, provided you have the patience to hold out for all 13 episodes.

I think the best part about the show is that until the season finale, it’s really not pleasant to watch. More often than not, it was painful. Sometimes I just wanted to cover my eyes or even leave the room for awhile out of embarrassment for Kudrow’s character, TV actress Valerie Cherish. All of The Comeback’s characters are perfectly played, but they clash so horribly with each other that you feel uncomfortable to the core and picture the show as just a colossal train wreck. This, of course, is the point, and once it sinks in, you won’t believe how smart and aware the show is being on so many levels.

It only just occurred to me to check out an official review of The Comeback. The reviewer didn’t like it, but one of her problems with the show — that the show is “as trying as the genre it attempts to skewer” — is the exact reasons why I find it brilliant and oddly endearing. The “trying” part is what makes it work. It flails but does not fail. If you have On Demand, give it a shot and decide for yourselves. It might not be renewed, so you’ll be able to say you knew it when.

Note: All of the above was written because I was going to write about the Emmys but my life partner ended up recording less than an hour of the show. WTF? I set it to tape the repeat tomorrow night on a different channel, but it won’t be the same, damnit.

I didn’t think my relationship with my life partner could ever be shaken, but it’s been acting up a like this a lot lately. I told it that we needed to talk. So not looking forward to the conversation. I bet I barely get a word in. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Here’s my commentary about what I did see of the Emmys: ENOUGH ALREADY with Eva Longoria and Donald Trump. Jesus. Showering these two with all sorts of campy attention makes me dislike them even more.