"Arrested Development" Returns for a Mixed, Puzzle-Like But Fun 4th Season

There are spoilers in this review. Also it's very rambly and digressive. You have been warned.

Few series have been more well-loved in death than in life as Arrested Development has been. I got hooked into the series when its second season was airing on Fox in the fall of 2004. Back then the show needed fans desperately. It was bleeding viewers like crazy, and the network had so little faith in the show's success that they cut the series from a full 22 episode season to an 18 episode season (a fact that gets joked upon within the actual series itself as the show was so wont to slyly, self-awarely do). Now, however, people would kill to have more Arrested Development, standing on the carnage of hackneyed, watered down sitcoms to look upon a few precious glimpses of what eventually blossomed into a cult phenomenon. Now we stand here (or more likely sitting back in a La-Z Boy) witnessing the return of the show for a fourth season, laid out before us all at once on Netflix.

But before we look forward, let's look back at what made Arrested Development so good that it would even warrant such a fervent desire for more episodes. Contrary to popular belief, Arrested Development wasn't wholly original. Like many great series before and after it, the greatness of Arrested Development was in synthesizing many elements into something distinctively its own. The mockumentary style had been done by the British version of The Office, as well as by the many Christopher Guest films. The look and feel recalls Wes Anderson movies. The pace and type of joke-telling owes a great debt to earlier series such as Seinfeld and Scrubs (even as they seem glacial by comparison). The self-referentiality that became the show's trademark and the choice to continually expand further and further outward are lessons learned from The Simpsons. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. What made Arrested Development special though was taking these many elements, combining them, and ramping up the pace, breathlessly testing the limits of the amounts of jokes the writers could fit into a given episode.

Arrested Development is that rare tv comedy with a good, representative pilot. Where most series fuss around and take time to figure out what they want to be, Arrested Development seemed to come fully formed right from the get go. This sense of knowing what it wanted to be carried over into the second episode "Top Bananna", which loses none of the frantic pace or the rate and variety of jokes, and demonstrated that the show was, as is probably quite apparent for fans, going to be heavily serialized. Part of the delight of Arrested Development is its serialization; the show is like an upside-down pyramid, constantly building outward, constantly looking back to its history to make a joke. And boy did the show ever love a reoccurring joke.

Really it's hard to separate the two qualities that make the show so enjoyable, memorable, influential and great: how damn funny it was and how damn audacious it was. There's rarely a moment that Arrested Development isn't trying to get a reaction out of you, and the guffaws-per-minute are astounding. Certainly the amount of jokes (and the variety - the show leaned on callback and self-referentiality, but it could do a pun, a sight gag, a parody, physical comedy, farcical moments, a character driven or narrative driven joke, among many others, and often simultaneously). But the other pleasure of Arrested Development is how unlike anything else it is. It was post-modern chic before anyone really realized that that was a cool thing. And that sensibility would carry on to influence show's like Community. The style and rate of joke delivery would influence shows like Happy Endings and 30 Rock, who learned at the feet of AD that without a live audience to wait up for you could fit in more jokes than you can shake a stick at into any given episode.

But now for why we're really here ... How is the fourth season of this revived series?

Um, interesting might be the most apt word for it. The show out of necessity took an unique approach to its storytelling. This was partially due to the conflicting schedules of a large ensemble cast. Good on them for rightfully becoming busily successful post-AD but it means that the writers have had to work around their schedules, minimizing the amount of series regulars in any given scene, patting out the edges with guest stars and cameos (some of which work better than others).

In the process, the series has lost one of its strongest qualities, it's ensemble nature. The show can no longer pop in on every character and the zany energy of the original series is somewhat lost in the process. Of course, this changes from episode to episode, with some ultimately being stronger than others. Part of the problem is that without studio oversight, the writers have no reason to shorten any episode which proves to play against them. 22 minutes actually feels like a totally reasonable time for this show once you've sat through some of these episodes which range from 28-37 minutes. Many of them need to be tightened up, as some characters simply can't justify the extended screen time. On the other hand, some characters can and the extra time feels like nothing at all. It inevitably likely comes down to your preference for a given character.

Now time has not softened any of Mitch Hurtwitz and the writers' ability to create intricate, dense story and joke telling. In fact, what's so often the surprising is how little the show relies on the old series. The writers create a number of new running jokes that become pretty funny in their own right (the use of text-as-inner thoughts gag annoyed me but eventually had me laughing when it switched from the guest star to George Senior; while I was more partial to the tipping black people joke and the recurrence of The Sounds of Silence). The callbacks are still there but the whole thing doesn't devolve into a complete nostalgia-fest, which is a blessing (even if the damn return itself is in of and itself a nostalgia-fest). The writers find ways to build upon what came before while establishing new scenarios that sometimes feel overlong but largely are pretty fun in their own right.

One of the interesting choices (alright: perhaps the most interesting choice) for the series is the decision to make each episode like a chapter. Each episode focuses on a particular character. When it's on a character that can justify the screen time, like Michael, this works incredibly well. But when it's someone like George Senior or Tobias, characters always best in small doses, the episode drags just a little bit as it tries to find ways to keep itself pushing forward. The season proves that Tobias was always sort of a bit character, and it takes awhile for his story to get going. Some of the episodes work better than others, and some will likely please you more depending on your preference for certain characters. But the structure demonstrates just how much the series was an ensemble piece; the show wouldn't be the series it was without every dysfunctional piece of the dysfunctional puzzle. A puzzle is what the season ultimately is, teasing out little things to reveal them down the road. Who's in the seat behind Lindsey? What's Maeby doing in George Michael's dorm? Why is Lucille at Tobias' musical? It's something to keep us distractedly binging along even when things are falling flat or there's not necessarily very funny things taking place. And it largely works. This episodic design is a way for the writers to break up what's essentially one giant episode. Sometimes it's cool how its used in order to create new meanings through different perspectives, but other times I'd much rather have had all the characters together. The fact we have to wait to get to standalones for characters like Maeby and Buster until near the end of the run is frustrating (but then again, the wait for these episodes might have made them seem better then they actually were).

Besides the structuring, there's the simple necessity to bridge the seven year gap that's taken place since the show ended. This often requires the show to gloss over large amounts of information and paint out storylines in broadstrokes, at least initially. Rather than the many little mini arcs we'd get if this time were parsed out across a few more seasons, the show treats, largely again out of necessity, the course of each character's life leading up to now as one giant plot, one big story arc. The broadstroke nature does leave a bit to be desired but the show at times turns this to its advantage putting characters into dire straights that the episode by episode time witnessing seven years passed would never have allowed for (for example, Michael and George Senior's debts would never have been this pressing otherwise. And I doubt Maeby would have gotten stuck in high school in perpetuity).

There's an obscene amount of plot to even get around to talking about but, in essence, the central thrust of the season revolves around Michael, who is sunken into debt after leaving the company and finishing the model home community (a business plan that goes bust when the housing market tanks). His $700,000 dollar debt to Lucille Two (aka Lucilla Austero, the neighbor to Lucille One) convinces him to get on board for the film adaptation of his family's life (a project originally spearheaded, unbeknownst to Michael, by his niece Maeby). There's a number of throughlines to the episodes (Cinco de Quatro, Austerity, Herbert Love, the Mexican border wall), but the one the show wants us to take notice of is Michael's attempts to get all of his family members to sign waivers in order to get the rights to make the film.

Yes, there's plenty, plenty elsewhere going on, and in a way the suggestion that Michael's story is the biggest is an oversimplification. Let me give you a the briefest level of summary I can muster for the rest of the season's plot:

-George Senior: moves down to Mexico, duping executives with a bunch of spiritual mumbo jumbo; his brother Oscar convinces him to buy the land, but his confidence in purchasing this land proves foolhardy and he spends the fallout attempting to build a wall along the Mexican border that Lucille convinced him to build in order to get out of debt.

George's first episode ("Borderline Personalities") is pretty good for the most part, but his second one ("Double Crossers") drags so very much that it becomes somewhat painful.

-Lindsey: has a artificial reawakening when she visits a "shaman" in India; she decides to try to make it work with Tobias only to hook up with an activist at a rehab clinic. Lindsey fails to help her activist boyfriend protest a politician, Herbert Love, who she ends up sleeping with and later takes the candidacy from when he falls into a coma.

Lindsey can carry a story much stronger than I ever thought possible. The first ("Indian Takers") is the stronger of the two though, just because the second one ("Red Hairing") is an obscene 37 minutes long.  

-Tobias: has a similarly parallel experience in India, to the cluelessness of Lindsey, that further inspires his passion for an acting career (the series also broaches the many "gay" jokes at Tobias' expense, allowing part of his plot to be about him confronting his family's perception of him). Tobias, accidentally getting himself registered as a sex offender, to get out of prison, takes a job at Lucille Two's rehab center, Austerity, where he stages a Fantastic Four musical in order to be with Maria Bamford.

Tobias' plots feel the most like they're B-plots, especially in the second episode ("Smashed"). Because of this, despite how funny the character is, he just can't carry the narrative for this long.

-GOB: goes along with an accidental marriage to Ann (Her?), but inevitably screws up the whole ordeal when he stages and fails to pull off a Christian-themed magic trick (illusions!); in his spiral downward he befriends a famous entourage, only to be despised by the group and take on a "roofie cycle" where he gets addicted to and forgets about getting addicted to roofies. He gets hired out by Michael to sell the rest of the model homes, while he attempts to get revenge on his archnemesis Tony Wonder by proving he's not gay, only to discover he might potentially have a tinge of homosexuality to himself.

GOB has two of the stronger episodes; I can't say exactly why but they're two of the more consistent, funny, and cohesive episodes. The first episode ("Colony Collapse") has real stakes for the character as he loses his family and his sense of stability. There's no real sense of stakes in a lot of these other episodes and it's strange that some of the strongest grounding is in his episodes.  

-Lucille: goes to a country resort-like prison after attempting to evade the FCC, where she befriends the Chinese triad to gain funding for the Mexican border wall. To get out prison she takes therapy sessions with Tobias and stars in his play as the villain.

Jessica Walters gets weirdly short shrifted. It's a very light, amusing episode ("Queen B"), but it also feels somewhat unnecessary. So much of her story had already been filled in by other episodes that it seems besides the point. It's still a nice showcase for Walters though.  

-Maeby: Kept repeating her senior year to make her parents notice her. When she realized her career in the entertainment industry wasn't going anywhere, she attempts to turn George Michael's  program FaceBlock into a major internet startup. Her fear of not graduating causes her to try to blackmail a student who she assumes is an undercover cop, but turns out to just be a minor, leading her to become arrested as a sex offender.

Do I think they could have thought of a better story for Maeby? Probably, but it's also pretty fitting for a character who just never really cared all that much, until she was forced to. It's interesting who got more screen time than others. Maeby's episodes is one of the better episodes. It says something worthwhile about the character while also being funny and breezy.

-George Michael: is off at college at UC Irvine. He seizes upon an opportunity to potentially rekindle things with Maeby by making FakeBlock seem like some innovative privacy protector when it's really just a woodblock ap. GM unwittingly finds himself dating the same woman as his father, Rebel Allie, the daughter of Ron Howard (narrator of the series and producer of Michael's film project).

George Michael has two good episodes that I really don't have much to say anything about. I like the notion of him embracing his inner liar. Plus him going after Maeby is a long established character trait. But I'm also weary of the open-ended cliffhanger that the last episode lands on.

-Buster: is coping with his mother being away, first by getting all Psycho-y, then by hooking up with Lucille Two, and finally by joining the army (again). After being discharged for getting injured in combat (for 47 straight hours of remote drone missile strikes - which he mistakes for video games), he's taken in by the wife, Ophelia Love, of the politician Herbert Love.

We get so very little of Buster up until his episode ("Off The Hook") that it's pleasant just to get extended time with him. The whole episode is kind of loopy but it's fun.

Do all these stories work? No. Some try too hard to reclaim the sensibility of the original series, and others head down cul-de-sacs that simply don't bear fruit. I was pleased at times, bored at others, frustrated at still yet others. I totally laughed at things, that's for sure. Some episodes were excellent and others were mediocre. Yes, the age has shown on this series. In of itself, there's an audacity in the intricacy of this narrative which takes time to pay off jokes and plots several episodes down the line. While a number of these are more clever (or occasionally self-indulgent) than funny, at times the plot becomes so dense that it's hard to get your head around (that above description - which is already massive - is only the baseline of the many stories). This ultimately left me more impressed than disappointed. Here's the thing about ambition, it can cover for the sins of a show. If a show is trying something really bold and cool, even if it misses the mark, you can't really leave totally dissatisfied. Back when it was the on air this was very true of Arrested Development. The show had its weaker moments (though not everyone cares to admit it), particularly in its third season, but it was always trying something that was unlike anything else out there that it was hard to fault the show.     

But it's also hard to unpack the structuring because the episodes feel so much like pieces of a whole. You can't really separate one from the other, as they fit together so precisely to tell a larger story. That story is essentially one big episode parsed out over 15. There are stories here that don't merit the screentime they receive. There's also the issue of the timeline which became hard to keep track of as the show danced around it so much. I still don't think I have it completely figured out.

The structuring is perhaps questionable, but I think it ultimately feels like an attempt to make this fresh again and to not lean so heavily on the original series. It's as if the writers know this is never going to live up to the old series, so why even bother; why not in stead try something completely different that still has undercurrents of the DNA of the original show. The downside though is that the series doesn't have the opportunity to bounce around from plot to plot and character and character. The pacing at times is hurt due to this. There's certainly times where spending so much time with any given character is somewhat outputting or less than satisfying. The extra amount of episodic time is perhaps also responsible for how the episodes are built. Episodes take much more time to get where they want to go and the pacing is less snappy due to this.   

The way Netflix released the episodes is also interesting. Putting all the episodes up at once all but encourages us to binge watch the series. This has created a problematic nature for discourse about the show, as we're all watching it at different times, at different paces, and thus are experiencing the show differently. At the same time, watching them all at once (which is doubtless what most people will do) allows us to gloss over some of the problems of the series and formatting. Don't like a Lindsey episode, well, keep pushing on through til you get to a character more on your wavelength. It also will likely allow us to glance over the fact that so much is being crammed into every episode. They may each be focused on a singular character, but the show packs in tons and tons of story material into each episode. On top of this, a number of characters have multiple episodes, suggesting that the writers had to figure out some way to make each "episode" feel like an isolated narrative, while also serving as a part of the bigger picture.    

Look, this season is likely to be divisive (and not just due to the odd structuring). Do I think it's good? Yes. It's good (not great), but it's also different. The problem with trying to recapture what made a show so special is that you're never going to be able to fully please fans who have obsessed over and adored a series for so long. What the great tv critic Todd VanDerWerff said about the revival of Futurama is very fitting here: "My feelings about new Futurama effectively explain why I have absolutely no interest in the Veronica Mars movie. A great TV show is alchemy, and you can’t reassemble alchemy years later, just a rough representation of what it felt like at the time." Arrested Development should have lay dead when it went off the air, but it didn't and so, yes, this isn't the same show. It's a resemblance of that old show, and it's different, but in its own way it's a fun time. It's like finding a few extra fries at the bottom of the bag. You didn't ask for more, you didn't need more, but heck if you aren't going to eat them. And if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, well, you can live with that because you likely would have killed for more episodes of this show and so you can't really totally complain now that you've gotten them.

Season four of Arrested Development wasn't the same show, but it was smart enough to recognize it could never be that same show. Was this format the best way to achieve that distance? I'm not sure, but it told a story, and at times that story overtook the rate of jokes, but it was a clever, intelligent, and unique story that could only have been spawned from these writers, this world and these characters. There were parts of it that fell flat and there were episodes that just didn't all that work. But I had a good time, just a different time.

And as I was trying to think of a nice way to sum up all my feelings I cam across this from tv critic Mike Ryan: "I have finished all 15 episodes of Arrested Development. Mixed feelings, but, who cares -- it was nice to see everyone again." I ended up dreading it much less than I expected. It turned out as good as I could have anticipated and it stopped leaving me anxious early on. I laughed, I smiled, I chuckled. There were things that had me laughing as hard as anything the old series managed. Some of my affection leaned on nostalgia and love for this cast, but, hey, lots and lots of very good series do that late in their runs. Things frustrated me, but on the whole I was pleased.

Stray Thoughts:
-Thanks for sifting through that rambly nonsense above. But I have just a few more thoughts.
-I appreciate Mitch Hurtwitz's decision not to make this just a bunch of normal episodes. It was much more interesting and engaging this way. Giving us more of the same would have been disappointing in different, potentially worse ways.
-You don't realize how important some characters are to the series (Maeby, George Michael, Buster) until you have to wait a dozen or more episodes to really get to spend time with them.
-The thematic links/parallels here are very basic but I appreciate how they reinforce how similar the members of the family are. Michael and his father are both seriously in debt. Maeby and Lucille both trapped themselves in different sorts of prison, at their own hands. Lindsey, Tobias, and Maeby all go to India for similar reasons. Maeby and Tobias both accidentally end up sex offenders. George Michael and Michael date the same woman. I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. I also like the way the series treats each installment as ___'s "Arrested Development", as we find, unsurprisingly, they've all entrenched in their old, unbreakable ways.
-The shift between the flashback and non-flashback episodes made for a weird experience (really jumping around temporally in general made for a strange experience). But the non-flashback episodes told more straightforward stories which made for less jumping through hoops.
-Buster probably couldn't have justified anymore than one episode, but it turns out Maeby in all likelihood could have. On the other hand, George Senior and Tobias totally could not.
-Lucille's revelation (she's not the villain, but the invisible woman) was far more touching than it had any right to be.
-Some of the cameos were unnecessary or even distracting. On the other hand, some of the new ones worked for me (Kristen Wiig as young Lucille was awesome). However, the only ones that really truly worked were the staple cameo players, particularly Mae Whitman returning as Ann. Henry Winkler as Barry Zuckercorn was also a welcome sight. Ron Howards appearance started out good and then got overplayed.
-May be I'm just easy or may be I just like puzzles, but lots of reveals worked really well. George Michael as the other guy dating Rebel; almost all the reveals related to Maeby were great.
- The most pleasing thing of all was how the characters remained as spot-on as ever, and the actors quickly re-inhabited them as if it's good to be back in the saddle.
-I don't know if we can entirely call these episodes as some of these really don't function well as an episode of television but these weird 30 minute things.
-I'm with critic Tim Goodman here: "The beauty about the Netflix version of Arrested Development is that, given the laws of time and hype, it should not have succeeded. If you were on Twitter in the early light of Sunday, when it launched, you would have read some discouraging comments ... and perhaps felt the twinge yourself of over-anticipation, when jokes seemed to fall flat or scenarios made no sense. But the series quickly found its pacing; the elaborate Rashomon structure revealed its glorious ambition and the combination of absurdity and intelligence meshed as well or better than you may have remembered from the original three seasons." That seems like a good place to end this.
-Oh and I would recommend exceptional tv critic Myles McNutt's thoughts on each episode. They're very brief, but vital, thoughtful reactions that informed this piece.