It's finally here! With the cinematic scope of a movie, this isn't like the first three series - or any other sitcom. But change always takes some getting used to...
With a couple of clears of the throat, literal and metaphorical, the much anticipated fourth series of Arrested Development arrives at last on Netflix today, dumped in its entirety with the enthusiasm of one of the members of the Bluth family eagerly offloading its stock in the family business, risks be damned.
The literal clears of the throat come from the narrator, Ron Howard, whose gentle coughs make a promising opening for the first episode, winking, in that distinctively Arrested Development way, at the audience. The metaphorical ones come from the dizzying jumps in time that the viewer is expected to keep up with from the very start. In the first 10 minutes, there are more confusing leaps in time than Back to the Future 2 managed in the whole of its film, including a flashback to several decades past in which Seth Rogen plays George Senior and – much more successfully – Kristen Wiig is young Lucille. But as ace as Wiig is at capturing Lucille's casual racism ("It's all part of the Mexican war on May fifth!") and threatening eye movements, she's no Jessica Walter. From this very first scene, all of those devoted fans of the show whose loyalty helped to bring the show back might be feeling as nervous as Buster Bluth about all of this change. Um, what's happened to Arrested Development?
Well, what's happened is that, just as the show's creator rehauled the traditional sitcom in 2003-06 when the original three series aired, he's trying to do the same again seven years on. But change always takes some getting used to.
Each episode of the show focuses on one character ("It's Michael's Arrested Development," intones Howard in the opening credits of the show, helping the viewer along), catching viewers up on what's been happening in their lives for the past few years. Each of their storylines is utterly credible to the character (of course Lindsay would, inspired by Eat Pray Love, go to India "to let go of all possessions and to find something cute to keep her possessions in") and the show's style (of course George Sr would open up a sweat lodge on the Mexican border to con CEOs out of their money and to try to screw up Stan Sitwell's plans). All of the main characters and essential subsidiary ones are back, including Barry Zuckercorn, Bob Loblaw, Sitwell, Carl Weathers, Warden Gentles and, of course, Lucille Ostero, and there are, if anything, even more blink and you'll miss 'em background gags (later on, Lucille's prison numbers are 07734, or "hello" upside down, referring back to her adopted Korean son, Annyong, who she names the Korean word for "hello") and eye-popping weirdness (did you really just see Liza Minelli attacked by an ostrich? Yes, yes you did). There are also, as if paying the fans back for their long memories, little nods back at passing jokes from the first three series, such as Michael's youthful performance in "You're a crook, Captain Hook" and Lucille's cry, "Look what the homosexuals have done to me!"
But as a watching experience it is entirely unlike the past three much-cherished series, and unlike any other sitcom. Hurwitz has spoken often about his desire to make an Arrested Development movie and he has taken advantage of Netflix's plans to release the whole series at once to make a sitcom that has cinematic scope. It demands the same kind of patience from the viewer as a show like The Wire, but with more ostrich attacks. It's extraordinary how much Hurwitz packs into each 30 minute episode. Sometimes it feels breathtakingly brilliant and other times it just feels confusing. It takes some getting used to, but by the fifth episode, the patience begins to pay off. I didn't adore the show in the way I instantly adored the first three series, but I was admiring it, and even enjoying it in a new way. So far, I'm keeping the faith.
**Episode one – Michael**
With the kind of confidence that Hurwitz has always exuded with this show, he opens proceedings with the most complicated and probably least funny episode. After a certain amount of time-leaping (and a somewhat disconcerting cameo from Amanda de Cadenet as a newscaster, although at least she's better than Seth Rogen who is horrendously miscast as George Sr), we learn that Michael's attempts to go into the real estate business failed, partly because California's property market crashed, and partly because the only inhabitants he could lure to Sudden Valley were a vulture and a scrubby bit of tumbleweed. Broke, homeless and now in hock to Lucille Ostero, who he may or may not have slept with to get more money, he goes to live with George Michael in his college dorm, and becomes the nightmare parent he always threatened to be. He is stunned when George Michael suggests he'd like to change his name and suggests Boy George as an alternative. "I think I'll stick with George Michael – at least that was consensual," mumbles his son. He interrupts his son's attempts to invent Faceblock, "the antisocial network", and walks in on his son and Maeby's private moments. Finally George Michael's patience ends and he throws his dad out and Michael gets a flight to Phoenix purely to see an article an inflight magazine – "Altitude, the number two most read magazine in coach, three after the safety card." It is predictably unflattering.
A rather depressing kick off, and not really in a fun way. I can't imagine rewatching this episode 117 times the way I rewatch episodes from the first three series, but let's not panic yet, Freeman. Make like Oscar and stay zen.
**Episode two – George Senior**
George is running a sweat lodge to con CEOs out of their money. To explain how and why all this has happened, we go back in time to young George, Lucille and Barry Zuckercorn (played, of course, by Henry Winkler's son, Max) and we see not only where George and Lucille learned where husbands and wives can't be tried for the same crime, but why they were always so fond of boats. George thinks Stan Sitwell is building a fence across the Mexican border and he and Lucille, who is now in custody, decide to stick it him well. They tell people they are getting divorced so no one will think they're in cahoots. George bumps into Oscar and some of his hippy friends, including a disgraced anaesthesiologist played by John Slattery ("Of course the bigger crime would have been if the patient hadn't woken up to testify against me") and realises they live on the Mexican border. George decides to go there, buy the land, turn it into a money-making sweatlodge and screw Sitwell's plans. But at one point he and Oscar have a vision of an ostrich man while chewing on a plant and it appears that he and Oscar swap strength and sex drive.
Still not wholly loving the show, but it does include one of the best scenes ever made in Arrested in which Lucille smokes into Buster's mouth and he blows it out the window. Maybe I just need more Buster? And Gob. Definitely need more Gob. Actually, I need more of everybody.
**Episode 3 – Lindsay**
After the arrest on the boat at the end of season three, Lindsay decides at last to leave her husband and her family, spurred on by a conversation with her ever supportive mother: "You can't say one nice thing to your daughter, can you?""Adopted daughter – and of course I can!" Inspired by Eat, Pray, Love, she goes to India to find herself ("And they have normal toilets there, right?"). While there, her shaman – who later appears to turn into an ostrich – tells her to return home to her love. She takes this as a sign that she should get back with Tobias and the two of them promptly buy a ridiculous house from the realtor, James "I don't sell" Carr(s), who Lindsay once tried and failed to have a fling with, and go to what Tobias thinks is a method acting clinic but is, inevitably, a methadone clinic (dismayingly, I saw that gag coming a mile away). There, they meet Marky Bark, the son of Johnny Bark who Lindsay once met in a tree, and DeBree, an addict played by the extraordinary Maria Bamford. They have a double date and Lindsay decides she's meant to be with Marky and runs away with him only to be woken up by an ostrich pecking her face.
OK, this one felt more Arrested, but I'm still not loving the format of focusing on one character at a time. Also, Portia de Rossi's face looks completely different from how it did seven years ago which is distracting. But I think things are picking up. I think. Please.
**Episode 4 – Michael**
The most jampacked and in-jokey episode yet. Michael is now working for the unnamed Google and is going around southern California in the Google car taking photos for Street View, meaning he is driving yet another absurdly tall car. He gets a call from Barry that Ron Howard wants to meet him at Imagine Entertainment ("Ron Howard wants to meet me? Did you get any other information?""Apparently he directed a movie called Cocoon"). So off he goes and learns that not only is Kitty Sanchez working there, but that Howard wants to make a film of his family, and this requires Michael to get signatures from all of his family members. Michael then bumps into a beautiful but still nameless woman, played by Isla Fisher, and he realises the only way he can get with her is if he sells out his family and impresses her by being a producer. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, Michael gets his father's signature only to realise that Ron Howard wants the film to be about Michael and George Michael, not Michael and George, and that the beautiful woman, Rebel Alley, is – he thinks – Ron Howard's mistress (actually, she's his daughter).
This could have been the most annoying episode yet with all the jokes about Ron Howard. But actually, it was fine. The real problems for me is that there's not enough interaction between the family, and Michael is becoming less and less likable, and, again, not really in a fun way. But we still have episodes from my favourite characters to come – Lucille, Gob, Tobias and Buster – and I'm beginning to see the shape of the plot arc over the series.
**Episode 5 – Tobias**
The best episode yet! Thank God. I knew I could rely on Tobias.
Tobias learns, to his astonishment, that his entire family thinks he's gay and, to disprove their theory decides to do the least gay thing he can think of: get a license plate saying "anustart" (a new start) and go on a pilgrimage to India, inspired by Eat, Pray, Love. It turns out that it was his luggage Lindsay took by mistake at the airport and it was Tobias who kept kicking Lindsay's seat on the plane. His pilgrimage is cut short when (Lindsay's) bus runs him over and he returns home, gets briefly back together with Lindsay, only to run off with DeBree just as Lindsay is running off with Marky Bark, with similarly disastrous results. With nowhere else to go, he returns to Lucille's apartment and rescues Lucille Ostero from an attacking ostrich ("Doctors said if that bird had got through my second layer of make up, he could have done real damage to my skin!"). She offers him a job at her rehab centre, he decides to keep working as the rock-covered The Thing from Fantastic Four on the streets. In desperation, he goes to see Maeby, crying out, "Is there a little girl here all by herself? Daddy needs to get his rocks off. I want to show her daddy's thing." He is promptly pounced upon by former newscaster John Beard, who is now hosting the paedophile-entrapment TV show, How to Trap a Local Predator.
OK, now I'm beginning to love it. The plotlines are starting to come together and the whole How to Trap a Local Predator (based on a real US show) is great and an excellent target for Arrested. Also, Maria Bamford is one of the few new guest stars who feels like she fits in right away, as opposed to being an awkward tack on. Pieces are falling into place.
Check back tomorrow for Hadley's recaps of episodes 6-10. Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.
With a couple of clears of the throat, literal and metaphorical, the much anticipated fourth series of Arrested Development arrives at last on Netflix today, dumped in its entirety with the enthusiasm of one of the members of the Bluth family eagerly offloading its stock in the family business, risks be damned.
The literal clears of the throat come from the narrator, Ron Howard, whose gentle coughs make a promising opening for the first episode, winking, in that distinctively Arrested Development way, at the audience. The metaphorical ones come from the dizzying jumps in time that the viewer is expected to keep up with from the very start. In the first 10 minutes, there are more confusing leaps in time than Back to the Future 2 managed in the whole of its film, including a flashback to several decades past in which Seth Rogen plays George Senior and – much more successfully – Kristen Wiig is young Lucille. But as ace as Wiig is at capturing Lucille's casual racism ("It's all part of the Mexican war on May fifth!") and threatening eye movements, she's no Jessica Walter. From this very first scene, all of those devoted fans of the show whose loyalty helped to bring the show back might be feeling as nervous as Buster Bluth about all of this change. Um, what's happened to Arrested Development?
Well, what's happened is that, just as the show's creator rehauled the traditional sitcom in 2003-06 when the original three series aired, he's trying to do the same again seven years on. But change always takes some getting used to.
Each episode of the show focuses on one character ("It's Michael's Arrested Development," intones Howard in the opening credits of the show, helping the viewer along), catching viewers up on what's been happening in their lives for the past few years. Each of their storylines is utterly credible to the character (of course Lindsay would, inspired by Eat Pray Love, go to India "to let go of all possessions and to find something cute to keep her possessions in") and the show's style (of course George Sr would open up a sweat lodge on the Mexican border to con CEOs out of their money and to try to screw up Stan Sitwell's plans). All of the main characters and essential subsidiary ones are back, including Barry Zuckercorn, Bob Loblaw, Sitwell, Carl Weathers, Warden Gentles and, of course, Lucille Ostero, and there are, if anything, even more blink and you'll miss 'em background gags (later on, Lucille's prison numbers are 07734, or "hello" upside down, referring back to her adopted Korean son, Annyong, who she names the Korean word for "hello") and eye-popping weirdness (did you really just see Liza Minelli attacked by an ostrich? Yes, yes you did). There are also, as if paying the fans back for their long memories, little nods back at passing jokes from the first three series, such as Michael's youthful performance in "You're a crook, Captain Hook" and Lucille's cry, "Look what the homosexuals have done to me!"
But as a watching experience it is entirely unlike the past three much-cherished series, and unlike any other sitcom. Hurwitz has spoken often about his desire to make an Arrested Development movie and he has taken advantage of Netflix's plans to release the whole series at once to make a sitcom that has cinematic scope. It demands the same kind of patience from the viewer as a show like The Wire, but with more ostrich attacks. It's extraordinary how much Hurwitz packs into each 30 minute episode. Sometimes it feels breathtakingly brilliant and other times it just feels confusing. It takes some getting used to, but by the fifth episode, the patience begins to pay off. I didn't adore the show in the way I instantly adored the first three series, but I was admiring it, and even enjoying it in a new way. So far, I'm keeping the faith.
**Episode one – Michael**
With the kind of confidence that Hurwitz has always exuded with this show, he opens proceedings with the most complicated and probably least funny episode. After a certain amount of time-leaping (and a somewhat disconcerting cameo from Amanda de Cadenet as a newscaster, although at least she's better than Seth Rogen who is horrendously miscast as George Sr), we learn that Michael's attempts to go into the real estate business failed, partly because California's property market crashed, and partly because the only inhabitants he could lure to Sudden Valley were a vulture and a scrubby bit of tumbleweed. Broke, homeless and now in hock to Lucille Ostero, who he may or may not have slept with to get more money, he goes to live with George Michael in his college dorm, and becomes the nightmare parent he always threatened to be. He is stunned when George Michael suggests he'd like to change his name and suggests Boy George as an alternative. "I think I'll stick with George Michael – at least that was consensual," mumbles his son. He interrupts his son's attempts to invent Faceblock, "the antisocial network", and walks in on his son and Maeby's private moments. Finally George Michael's patience ends and he throws his dad out and Michael gets a flight to Phoenix purely to see an article an inflight magazine – "Altitude, the number two most read magazine in coach, three after the safety card." It is predictably unflattering.
A rather depressing kick off, and not really in a fun way. I can't imagine rewatching this episode 117 times the way I rewatch episodes from the first three series, but let's not panic yet, Freeman. Make like Oscar and stay zen.
**Episode two – George Senior**
George is running a sweat lodge to con CEOs out of their money. To explain how and why all this has happened, we go back in time to young George, Lucille and Barry Zuckercorn (played, of course, by Henry Winkler's son, Max) and we see not only where George and Lucille learned where husbands and wives can't be tried for the same crime, but why they were always so fond of boats. George thinks Stan Sitwell is building a fence across the Mexican border and he and Lucille, who is now in custody, decide to stick it him well. They tell people they are getting divorced so no one will think they're in cahoots. George bumps into Oscar and some of his hippy friends, including a disgraced anaesthesiologist played by John Slattery ("Of course the bigger crime would have been if the patient hadn't woken up to testify against me") and realises they live on the Mexican border. George decides to go there, buy the land, turn it into a money-making sweatlodge and screw Sitwell's plans. But at one point he and Oscar have a vision of an ostrich man while chewing on a plant and it appears that he and Oscar swap strength and sex drive.
Still not wholly loving the show, but it does include one of the best scenes ever made in Arrested in which Lucille smokes into Buster's mouth and he blows it out the window. Maybe I just need more Buster? And Gob. Definitely need more Gob. Actually, I need more of everybody.
**Episode 3 – Lindsay**
After the arrest on the boat at the end of season three, Lindsay decides at last to leave her husband and her family, spurred on by a conversation with her ever supportive mother: "You can't say one nice thing to your daughter, can you?""Adopted daughter – and of course I can!" Inspired by Eat, Pray, Love, she goes to India to find herself ("And they have normal toilets there, right?"). While there, her shaman – who later appears to turn into an ostrich – tells her to return home to her love. She takes this as a sign that she should get back with Tobias and the two of them promptly buy a ridiculous house from the realtor, James "I don't sell" Carr(s), who Lindsay once tried and failed to have a fling with, and go to what Tobias thinks is a method acting clinic but is, inevitably, a methadone clinic (dismayingly, I saw that gag coming a mile away). There, they meet Marky Bark, the son of Johnny Bark who Lindsay once met in a tree, and DeBree, an addict played by the extraordinary Maria Bamford. They have a double date and Lindsay decides she's meant to be with Marky and runs away with him only to be woken up by an ostrich pecking her face.
OK, this one felt more Arrested, but I'm still not loving the format of focusing on one character at a time. Also, Portia de Rossi's face looks completely different from how it did seven years ago which is distracting. But I think things are picking up. I think. Please.
**Episode 4 – Michael**
The most jampacked and in-jokey episode yet. Michael is now working for the unnamed Google and is going around southern California in the Google car taking photos for Street View, meaning he is driving yet another absurdly tall car. He gets a call from Barry that Ron Howard wants to meet him at Imagine Entertainment ("Ron Howard wants to meet me? Did you get any other information?""Apparently he directed a movie called Cocoon"). So off he goes and learns that not only is Kitty Sanchez working there, but that Howard wants to make a film of his family, and this requires Michael to get signatures from all of his family members. Michael then bumps into a beautiful but still nameless woman, played by Isla Fisher, and he realises the only way he can get with her is if he sells out his family and impresses her by being a producer. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, Michael gets his father's signature only to realise that Ron Howard wants the film to be about Michael and George Michael, not Michael and George, and that the beautiful woman, Rebel Alley, is – he thinks – Ron Howard's mistress (actually, she's his daughter).
This could have been the most annoying episode yet with all the jokes about Ron Howard. But actually, it was fine. The real problems for me is that there's not enough interaction between the family, and Michael is becoming less and less likable, and, again, not really in a fun way. But we still have episodes from my favourite characters to come – Lucille, Gob, Tobias and Buster – and I'm beginning to see the shape of the plot arc over the series.
**Episode 5 – Tobias**
The best episode yet! Thank God. I knew I could rely on Tobias.
Tobias learns, to his astonishment, that his entire family thinks he's gay and, to disprove their theory decides to do the least gay thing he can think of: get a license plate saying "anustart" (a new start) and go on a pilgrimage to India, inspired by Eat, Pray, Love. It turns out that it was his luggage Lindsay took by mistake at the airport and it was Tobias who kept kicking Lindsay's seat on the plane. His pilgrimage is cut short when (Lindsay's) bus runs him over and he returns home, gets briefly back together with Lindsay, only to run off with DeBree just as Lindsay is running off with Marky Bark, with similarly disastrous results. With nowhere else to go, he returns to Lucille's apartment and rescues Lucille Ostero from an attacking ostrich ("Doctors said if that bird had got through my second layer of make up, he could have done real damage to my skin!"). She offers him a job at her rehab centre, he decides to keep working as the rock-covered The Thing from Fantastic Four on the streets. In desperation, he goes to see Maeby, crying out, "Is there a little girl here all by herself? Daddy needs to get his rocks off. I want to show her daddy's thing." He is promptly pounced upon by former newscaster John Beard, who is now hosting the paedophile-entrapment TV show, How to Trap a Local Predator.
OK, now I'm beginning to love it. The plotlines are starting to come together and the whole How to Trap a Local Predator (based on a real US show) is great and an excellent target for Arrested. Also, Maria Bamford is one of the few new guest stars who feels like she fits in right away, as opposed to being an awkward tack on. Pieces are falling into place.
Check back tomorrow for Hadley's recaps of episodes 6-10. Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.