The highly anticipated fourth season of Arrested Development hasn’t even been in the world for two weeks and already fans have made it their own. We’re quoting it, meming it, creating merchandise based on it and now… completely altering it.

Creator Mitchell Hurwitz created a complex, labyrinthine story for the fourth season. It is told largely out of order to keep the audience guessing, and because he could rarely get his full cast together at the same time. Personally, I applauded the slow burn season as something truly special, but others found the new structure off-putting.

And so the Internet edited the fourth season of Arrested Development in chronological order. This is sure to be controversial, much like The Godfather Saga and later The Godfather Trilogy: 1901–1980, in which Francis Ford Coppola’s films were cut into one chronological run, or the Memento DVD edit, which reversed the film to remove all the surprises. And those were official, while this is not.

The AV Club linked to Reddit user morphinapg, who not only edited the 15 episodes down to 11, but gave them new names. You can link to them all here.

I have mixed feeling on this situation. On one hand, Hurwitz and his team carefully crafted the new season of Arrested Development to be watched in a specific way. There are jokes that takes many episodes to pay off, massive reveals, and a real sense of weight that was missing from the first three seasons of the show. The complex structure made the fourth season new, different and a worthy way to bring the series back after seven years. Arrested Development was never for everyone and the new season bolstered that impression.

Then there’s the part of me who, four episodes in, was frustrated at the new structure. I totally understand watching and thinking “I wish these were different.” Eventually, as everything began to fall into place, I went the other way, but I do sympathize. For an editor, it would be quite a big project and the material is out there. Why not give it a shot?

Ultimately, I’ll never watch these simply because I’ll stick with the creator’s version, thank you very much. Plus it’s copyrighted content, owned by Netflix, that’s being illegally pirated for free. But these fan edits are always an interesting experiment, especially in cases where the content is so polarizing.

Here’s morphinapg’s write up and explanation of the process. Do you think he’s hurting the show by doing this?