There are also some fantastic Buster moments (like a party catered just to his “limited palette” of jell-o and plain hamburgers), and a fun mini-plot where George Michael makes friends with a would-be frat house of Noahs while visiting Mexico. In particular, Maeby impersonating a 60-year-old woman so she can live in a retirement community is genuinely funny, and some of the jokes there - “He can’t hear anything because he has aids! Hearing aids” - are very reminiscent of the original seasons. No one else has much of an individual story yet, and that’s a shame, because the strongest comedy so far comes from the plots that are the most removed from Michael (who is always better as a foil to his crazy family than on his own). While the family is usually better together, they’re mostly scattered again (with a few strange pairings that don’t really work, like Lucille and Tobias), and the narrative focus is completely on Michael. As for Buster ( Tony Hale), well, per usual he’s being controlled by his family, and ultimately may hold the key to the mysterious maybe-disappearance of Lucille Austero ( Liza Minnelli). Gob ( Will Arnett) is still processing a potential attraction to men, so he and his testerone-less father George ( Jeffrey Tambor) go on a failed journey to Mexico together to try and rekindle their desire for women. Lindsay ( Portia de Rossi) barely plays a role in the early episodes, though eventually she is encouraged to run for office by her mother Lucille ( Jessica Walter), who is taking some time for self-reflection in quasi-therapy with Tobias ( David Cross) who is himself working to prove his worth to the family. Somehow the cautious references to George Michael and Maeby ( Alia Shawkat) being attracted to each other in the early seasons now seems exceptionally tame compared to this new, overt, and pretty gross revelation that never seems to find an end point. Something is broken in his relationship with George Michael ( Michael Cera), though, after Season 4 revealed the two are sleeping with the same actress (played by Isla Fischer), one of the most cringe-worthy things the show has ever done. Instead of being heavy on jokes with the narration as a way to transition from scene to scene, the balance is almost all explanations with the occasional attempt at reminding us of jokes from seasons past (remember the banana stand? Or Tobias’ license plate? Or the cornballer?) Often the narration runs over the dialogue in a way that’s not at all reminiscent of the sharp, layered, exceptionally clever script construction of those early seasons.Īs for where the Bluth family is now, Season 5 focuses on Michael ( Jason Bateman) being pulled back into his family’s problems again and again, with many references to the number of times he says he’s really done with them before. The plot going into Season 5 has become so convoluted, for instance, that Ron Howard’s exposition dominates every scene. On Netflix, there’s nothing to fight against - the creators have complete control to do anything they want. Often it was its own network, Fox, and the constraints of being a broadcast comedy it made the series sharp and funny, its meta humor a righteous calling out of a tired old framework housing a brash new comedic style. One of the thing that made Arrested Development so great in its early years was how it always had something to fight against. The first episode of the new season is essentially all a catchup on the forgettable (and nonsensical) fourth season, which continues to haunt Season 5 throughout the first five (of an eventual eight in this set, and eight more later this year) episodes available to critics. And while that might have been the end of it (and probably should have been), it’s not. But instead of cutting losses and moving on, Hurwitz recently recut the season into the original format, rereleasing it on Netflix before Season 5. Reactions were mixed at best, and the season didn’t really come together until the very end - even then, it was messy and largely unsatisfying even to diehard viewers. Taking advantage of its new platform, Arrested Development broke away from the storytelling of its first three seasons, and instead focused each episode on a single character. Arrested Development’s highly-anticipated fourth season pickup by Netflix was ultimately not embraced by fans in the way that its creators and producers Mitch Hurwitz, Brian Grazer, and Ron Howard surely hoped it would be. Let's go back just a little bit, because the show certainly does.
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