Stephen Glass reviews Season 4 of Arrested Development….
Seven years of wishing and hoping and begging and praying on the part of innumerable hardcore Arrested Development fans came to an end last Sunday with the simultaneous release of 15 new episodes on Netflix, and early reviews all seem to agree; it’s different, it’s difficult, it’s darker, and it’s just not as funny as the show we know.
Suffice it to say there are points I agree with in these reviews, but as with the show’s first three seasons, your mind isn’t really made up having only watched it for a week. This isn’t to say you wouldn’t love Arrested Development from the pilot onward, but if you do, in all likelihood you’ll love it and laugh with it more and more on repeat viewings. It’s home viewing and reviewing on DVD which made Arrested the favourite it is. The density, intricacy and sheer volume of gags, many broad and cartoonish, many hidden, foreshadowing narrative turns, make the show a treat to pore over again and again. It helps of course that the cast are brilliant across the board, each playing their roles on the best side of cartoonish, bold and animated but always believable. And without ever being portentous or smug, the show is a terrific, Pynchonian satire of America beat by beat, be it in the overarching narrative of a selfish, capitalist leader, or the more momentary jabs at celebrity culture, alcoholism, homophobia, racism and a national consciousness of arrested development.
Yet the show was warm and heartfelt, and understood its characters’ (comic) flaws. What is Gob’s (Will Arnett) farcical obsession with magic if not a desperate attempt to prove himself talented to an over-demanding father? And why the vein of incest running through the Bluth family – not least Motherboy Buster (Tony Hale) – if not to suggest a family deeply in love with one another but at a loss as to how best express it?
All of this intelligence, warmth and humour is back in Season 4, though perhaps dished out at different rates. This should not come unexpected, much was discussed pre-release about the format of the new episodes, and it’s surprising how many fans are ardent that this is not the show they wanted, when what we relished about the first three seasons was their newness, their puzzle-box complexity and the somewhat ridiculous depth and background of character.
Conceived apparently as the opening act of the long-gestating Arrested Development movie, season 4 is a huge project, certainly a work to admire, if not fall head-over-heels for at first glance. It’s a sprawling, singular episode, seven-hours-and-change of catch-up with the Bluths/Fünkes/Sitwells/Austeros/Veals/Wonders over the ‘great dark period’ since Lucille (Jessica Walter) commandeered the Queen Mary to escape arrest at the close of Season 3, and Michael (Jason Bateman) once again tried to leave his family and start afresh with Charlie Brownish son George Michael (Michael Cera, now credited also as consulting producer).
Each of the central characters is granted an episode or two of their own, and plot lines intersect and impact upon one-another in ways not entirely clear until the close (and not even then; again one of the joys of this season will be piecing the line of causality together on repeat viewings). It’s an amazing piece of work, elaborately-constructed but beyond gimmick, with an overriding sense of tension and drama. This is more than just 15 concurrent stories intertwining; that’s hard enough to get right as is. But what’s so impressive about the structure here is the order of episodes, less how than when we shift between points-of-view. Actions and events are recontextualised in very deliberate fashion, for the funniest, most dramatically telling, and often darkest effect (consider the quiet growth of sex offender jokes early on and their simply weird, yet sunny impact on George Michael in a later episode). The importance of the season’s chronology becomes increasingly clear around the mid-season point, and plot points we were apparently so clear on have the rug pulled out from beneath them (the Social Network-like evolution of George Michael’s FakeBlock app for one).
One of the reasons this structure works so well is because the actors are at the top of their game, better than before even. Standouts upon first viewing would be David Cross as Tobias, who remains as incompetent and optimistic as ever, now struggling to practice improv day-to-day (“Yes, and…uhh, yes, and…”), and Will Arnett as Gob, who’s second episode, featuring Ben Stiller’s Tony Wonder, is one of the season’s (and series) absolute best, and who is masterful at giving line readings with four concurrent tones and meanings. Arnett is magnificent as Gob, his mixture of brashness and ignorance riding in tandem with the both brash and hyper-elaborate wordplay – both verbal and visualised – with which creator Mitch Hurwitz and his writers are so enamored, and so skilled at writing. The aspect of production necessity in making this season – it’s been documented how mismatched the actors’ schedules were and how rarely they were able to literally work on-set together, leading to body doubles and extensive greenscreen – makes the clockwork nature of the writing and directing all the more impressive, as well as the workmanship of the well-seasoned performers.
The supporting cast are also great, both old and new. Henry Winkler’s Barry Zuckercorn remains forever tactless, even as a fledgling attorney in flashback, and the aforementioned Ben Stiller blows his previous performance as Tony Wonder out of the water, even before he’s said a word or moved (his poster in the latest ‘Poof!’ magazine proclaiming “I’m here, I’m queer…now I’m over here!” was a favourite moment). The new guests, including Terry Crews, recently seen on top form in The Newsroom and here playing the pompous, venal politician Herbert Love, and Isla Fisher as a nameless, party-girl redhead with a series of mysterious men in her life, don’t miss a beat. The sole exception to this is perhaps Seth Rogen, who, charismatic as he is, has the unfortunate task of playing next to Kristen Wiig as a young Lucille Bluth, and who is astonishing in the role.
The recurrence of some and lack of other fan-favourite characters (don’t expect a reminder that “it ain’t easy bein’ brown”), also proves comforting, and tells us that this is a show which, while owing so much to its audience, has a creative team who won’t bow wholesale to fan pressures. Without giving anything away, many great characters are back (if only for a scene or two), but so many others are not, but they don’t feel missing. (Most surprising and grin-inducing is the vaguely creepy return of a character any Arrested fan will remember but wouldn’t think of putting in their top 20 ‘I want to return’s). Season 4 needs what Mitch Hurwitz and his team know it needs, and momentary disappointments aside, any Arrested Development has substantial value. To complain that it’s not the show you wanted is like being gifted the Mona Lisa and complaining that it’s too small.
There are problems though, which are generally confined to the first two or three episodes. Michael opens the season and we immediately have to get used to the sheer length and breadth of the altered format (eight minutes more than the previously-crammed 22 makes a vast amount of difference to pacing), and his was an episode lacking in laughter and heavy on long, uncomfortable tensions. It’s a shame to say it, but he was disappointingly ignorant. He and Lindsay (Portia DeRossi), who’s episode soon follows, aren’t as immediately funny to watch alone as Buster, Tobias or Gob, and their episodes feature the most “who’s this new person? why does so-and-so have this haircut/scar?” exposition. But then maybe on repeat viewings I won’t think so, I’ll find that there was plenty hidden from me (you might say I was face-blind) having not attuned to the motifs and running gags of Season 4 first time, and on re-watching these episodes will blossom.
By the end of the season you can both see the use of an Arrested film, to bring this to a close rather than risk pushing it too far and too long, but you can also see the worth in making another series like this one. The size and ambition of it gives it real weight, and the sense of an ending formed is fascinating. Throughout the season you’re curious as to who’s episode will provide the key to tying this all together, which will perhaps be the episode which catches up with the present and then goes on until the show’s conclusion. This tension is dealt with really impressively in Season 4’s closing scenes, bringing the show back around to its beginnings (both seasonal and thematic) while leaving plenty open for further episodes or a film. Like a roofie circle, Arrested Development Season 4 is a beginning and endless loop, a shaggy dog story chasing its tail, but one which, like all Arrested Development before it (and hopefully after) won’t be exhausted of humour or intrigue until it’s been watched an inhuman number of times, if ever.
Stephen Glass
