Arrested Development

Years: 2003 - 2006
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 53
Created By: Mitchell Hurwitz

Main Cast:

Jason Bateman as Michael Bluth
Portia de Rossi as Lindsay Fünke
Will Arnett as Gob Bluth
Tony Hale as Buster Bluth
Michael Cera as George Michael Bluth
David Cross as Tobias Fünke
Alia Shawkat as Maeby Fünke
Jeffrey Tambor as George Bluth
Jessica Walter as Lucille Bluth

It’s really hard to do smart, Simpsons-style humor in a live-action format. It’s even harder when you don’t have a LOL SPIDERPIG ROFLMAO character like Homer Simpson leading the action. Add to that a story arc which makes it harder to enjoy episodes unless you’ve seen each one before it, and you have a show that’s going to have a very short lifespan. Regardless of how brilliantly funny Arrested Development was, it’s amazing that it managed to survive long enough to reach three seasons and wrap up in a satisfactory manner. And fans, you need to bow down and start kissing Fox’s hairy beanbags for keeping the show on for as long as they did, because instead of botching a brilliant show with network bumbling, Fox actually kept it alive longer than any other sane network would have. As much as fans would like to argue this point, the show’s ratings were godawful, and it was consistently the lowest-rated comedy on TV. Even putting it in a coveted time slot following The Simpsons didn’t help, as viewers switched channels even before the Gracie Films lady could go “shush.” Fox was losing money by keeping this show alive. You should thank them for it.

For the millions upon millions of you who skipped it, the show is about the wealthy Bluth family, who’s patriarch (George Bluth) is the CEO of the Bluth Company, a company that builds mini-mansions. After making his wife Lucille the CEO, George Sr. gets arrested by the SEC for blowing money on ridiculous “personal expenses” and other potentially illegal activities. Their son Michael is then asked to run the company, and thus the show begins, with Michael acting as the responsible one looking after his son (George Michael, who wants to fuck his cousin) his mom, his two brothers (the shitty magician and Segway enthusiast Gob and the borderline retarded Buster) his sister (the attention-starved and materialistic Lindsay), her husband (the closeted never-nude Tobias), and his niece (the rebellious Maeby). After that, the story starts getting complicated, and the story attempts to remedy this by a series of flashbacks that occur during the show that attempt to bring viewers up-to-speed whenever a previous plot point gets mentioned. The show deals with the family coming to grips with George Sr. being in jail, Michael’s attempts to run the company smoothly, his siblings constantly sucking money away from the company and spending it on bullshit, his son trying to deal with lusting after his cousin, Tobias wanting to become an actor, and many other smaller plot points that are a hell of a lot funnier when you’re watching them than just seeing them described.

When this show first came out, I remember hearing a lot about how great it was. I decided to give it a shot, and what I saw was annoying and unfunny. Therefore, I never bothered tuning back in, making me part of the reason why the show failed (I had a Nielson box, so fuck you, my viewership was important!). Years later some coworkers started telling me that I had to give the show another chance, swearing that if I watched it from the beginning, I would enjoy it more. Someone even went so far as to leave their copies of seasons one and two in my box at work, so I relented. I watched the first episode, then the second, and I kept going for several episodes. And I found out that they were right, that this was an amazing show that deserved all the praise it got. I’ve only gone through the show once, but the episodes were so densely packed that I have the urge to start rewatching them, just to catch the jokes that I missed the first time around. And that episode I saw that sucked ass? When I saw it the second time it was great.

Of course, this is exactly why people stayed away from the show in droves. You just can’t have a show like this on a major network and expect it to be a hit. The most successful shows have something for everyone, and there just wasn’t enough simple, dumb humor in this show for it to be a success. The casual viewer needs to be able to dip into it at any point and immediately have enough information to enjoy it, and as funny as they were, the flashbacks just weren’t effective in conveying the information you needed to know. Without seeing the pilot episode where George Michael gets kissed by Maeby as a way to freak out their parents, his attraction to her just comes off as creepy. I mean, even after seeing the pilot it’s still creepy, but at least there’s a grounding to some previous experience the two had. It also didn’t help that the main characters were a bunch of unlikeable assholes. Once again, without following the whole story, Michael comes off as a selfish prick that doesn’t want to help his family, and the family comes off as a bunch of greedy cocksuckers who can’t stand him or each other. Also, because many jokes rely on the audience’s previous knowledge of past episodes, they fall flat for viewers tuning in for the first time. It’s like shooting a baby in the kneecaps and expecting it to walk. It’s ain’t gonna happen, son.

Finally, the show was remarkably consistent, with the exception of a couple repeated jokes near the end that didn’t work. I wasn’t wild about Buster’s hook hand, but that may have been dealt with further as the series progressed (maybe I’ll love it when I rewatch the series. Who knows?). Everyone seemed to be on fire during all three seasons, and it’s hard to tell when it would have started to lose steam. If the show was a hit then the season three finale would clearly have ended differently, as everyone involved seemed to know that the end was coming and that they’d have to wrap things up. And considering that no other networks bothered to pick the show up, and that no one can even pull everything together to get the movie made, it seems safe to say that the story ended with the finale.

Recommended for: elitists, people who watch The Daily Show/Colbert Report, fans of The Office, Simpsons fans that didn’t piss their pants laughing over “Spiderpig,” people who say “quite” a lot.