What starts off as a slow, unfamiliar addendum to a beloved series suddenly hits its stride and becomes one of the most ingenious seasons of TV sitcom ever produced.
With exams over and this issue of Vision almost in print, I’ve at last gotten the chance to finish the fourth season of Arrested Development. And what a tremendous season it was.
The first three seasons of the show aired between 2003 and 2006 after which Fox canceled it due to low ratings. Fans, however, adored it and for the next six years, rumors of a movie intermittently floated around the internet. In 2012, Netflix picked up the series and began filming the 15-episode masterpiece that we now have.
Arrested Development was always a little odd, and that’s what fans loved about it. Its characters were all awful human beings; its jokes were often subtle and self-referential; and its plot somehow managed to appear both nonexistent and painstakingly thought through years in advance. Season four took all this and brought it to a whole new level.
Going into the season, I was just a little apprehensive, having just finished my months long ritual of waking up every Friday morning to watch and subsequently cry over the fourth season of Community. I was put off by the idea of a reboot that promised to be different to the first three seasons of a show I love precisely for its style. And for a few episodes, it seemed like my fears weren’t misplaced.
The first three episodes of season four confirmed every one of my worries. Each episode was about ten minutes longer than they used to be, skewing the pacing and making it feel different to what I’ve come to recognize as Arrested Development. The entire premise was also different. Where once the show was about the entire family, now every episode focused on one individual character. It felt off, and the writers’ decision to add as many cameos as they could (including the very conspicuous inclusion of the entire main cast of Workaholics in the very first episode) was distracting at best. To the faithful fan, the show seemed too different; to a curious newcomer, it was just confusing.
But little by little it dawned on me that I was watching TV magic unfold. Once I’d gotten used to the format, the show became a work of genius. There’s one storyline that runs throughout the season, beginning with where season three left off and ending five years later, and each episode focuses on one character’s perspective of those events. Between Michael Bluth trying to get his family to sign away the rights to their lives to director Ron Howard (who happens to narrate Arrested Development) and Tobias Funke trying to put together a musical version of the Fantastic Four in a rehab clinic where he was mistakenly believed to be a sex offender, everybody’s lives somehow come together in a way that successfully treads the line between convolution and storytelling mastery.
Every scene is like a piece of a jigsaw, showing individual outlooks that make more and more sense as other scenes from other episodes come together to form some context. For example, an early conversation between George and Michael Bluth is, at first, a quick discussion about film rights. As the season carries on, the conversation is revealed to be much more complex, with both characters’ motivations coming out and raising the stakes of what was initially shown to be a minute-long conversation. At any given moment, there’s something innocuous happening on screen that later turns out to be a pivotal moment in someone else’s story and, therefore, the entire season as a whole. It’s Christopher Nolan’s Memento on steroids, minus the short-term memory loss.
Fans have always loved discussing Arrested Development’s storyline and use of foreshadow, but this season kicks everything up a notch. There’s something incredibly entertaining about watching an episode and seeing how it fits in with previous events in earlier episodes. It also ensures that the replay value is fantastic since every repeat viewing will necessarily bring out more of the connections and coincidences you’ve previously missed.
The humour is also still there, and it is, for the most part, just as funny as it used to be; that is to say, it’s still reliant on wordplay and a healthy dose of dramatic irony. Sometimes it does feel like certain jokes drag on for too long, and that’s partly due to the lack of a network-enforced run time. Overall, though, for an Arrested Development fan, it does not disappoint.
So why exactly is this season as ingenious as I claim it is? After all, it’s not the funniest show around, and there have been more consistent seasons of sitcoms in the past (even in Arrested Development’s own past for that matter). Conceptually, though, it is nothing short of brilliant, and it embraces the current state of television like no other show has. By making what is essentially an eight-hour film where everything is interconnected and every episode is necessary, it is expecting viewers to be able to commit and watch it at their own pace. Something like this would have been hard to pull off without a service such as Netflix, and certainly would have been impossible before box sets solved the problem of occasionally missing an episode of your favorite program.
But is it for everyone? Definitely not. Arrested Development was initially a commercial failure partly because it wasn’t as easily accessible as many other sitcoms, and season four does absolutely nothing to change that. But for those who like the show, there is nothing more satisfying than watching the Bluths’ story develop the way it does this season. When people ask how sequels and reboots should be done, this is the answer. Original yet faithful, adventurous yet engaging, and of course, still hilarious.
Perfectly said. The new format is daring, innovative and simply genius.