The storylines fit neatly with the timeline of the last seven years, and go a long way toward making the show’s evolution feel believable - though the startup story spends way too much time riffing on the fact that people confuse Cera with Jesse Eisenberg. In a stroke of brilliance, even the StairCar gets a 21st-century-appropriate upgrade. The show also takes a very modern turn, with George Michael starting an "anti-social network" and everything from Skype to the BlackBerry PlayBook making noteworthy cameos. The Arrested Development world is bigger than ever, with new model homes, dorm rooms, high-end prisons, bizarre restaurants, and desert sweat lodges in which our many protagonists spend their time. Nearly everything's here, except as best I can tell no one ever said "There's always money in the banana stand" and there's only the slightest hint of a chicken dance.
F reference you'd miss if you were breathing too loudly at the time.
There are callbacks everywhere, from the Mr. and his identical twin Oscar spend a lot of time together, a Jeffrey-Tambor-on-Jeffrey-Tambor dynamic I wish we'd seen more of before. George Michael’s hyper-religious ex-girlfriend Ann Veal comes back with a vengeance, somehow still delightfully insignificant even in a much-expanded role. (That one respite was thanks to the re-introduction of the casual racism Arrested Development does so well.) There are too many flashbacks, too much re-introduction, too much time spent essentially saying "OMG you guys can you believe they cancelled us?"īut slowly over the next few episodes, the show finds its footing again, as it re-introduces so many of the characters and jokes that made it famous. I laughed out loud exactly once during those three episodes, and nearly gave up watching the show entirely - the first 90 minutes of season four felt longer than the next six hours. otherwise he's going to have to Skype me from a TGI Friday's."
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Netflix's bumper is ugly, odd, and cloying, pointing out that it's only a "semi-original series." Then for the next three episodes, from Ron Howard's narratorial throat-clearing to the "Showstealer Pro Trial Version" watermark splashed over footage from old seasons, Arrested Development is hell-bent on reminding us that it was cancelled seven years ago. I hated season four from the second it started. It doesn't really matter, though - it's just a loose thread tying everyone together, and we're probably better off not tugging too hard at it. There’s a core conflict running through the whole season, but it’s perpetually shifting and confusing, and I found myself constantly having to pause the show to remember why Michael ended up in this restaurant, or why he’s pretending he doesn’t know Lindsay. I, for one, am happy about that fact.Įvery new episode revolves around a single character, guiding us on an inevitably winding and interconnecting journey through their last seven years. In 2006, you'd sneeze and a half-dozen jokes would be missed and gone into Fox's ether now they're here for us, forever. It’s tailor-made for the DVR era and especially for Netflix - the episodes were to be viewable in any order, available all at once for infinite re-watching, rewinding, sharing, and dissecting.
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I fully support both decisions, and when the show's 15 new episodes finally became available on May 26th, I bailed on my family’s Memorial Day activities, hunkered down in front of my TV on a gorgeous day in New York City, and watched every single one.Įveryone’s talked about how Arrested Development was always designed for 2013 - the show was so fast, so smart, and so dense, and without a way to pause or rewind, often too much. Years, even - there's a part of me that's convinced CEO Reed Hastings added Instant Streaming to Netflix just so we could all re-watch the show, then started producing original content just so he could bring it back. I've been waiting for Arrested Development to arrive on Netflix for months. "Family first unless there's a work thing." "It's like you always say," George Michael tells his dad.
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