NOTE: This piece was originally published on Critics at Large on May 29, 2013. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
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Jason Bateman returns as Michael Bluth in the new season of Arrested Development, now available on Netflix |
Francine (to Stan): Are
you still moping about Steve? Come on. He's just going through a phase. It's
like Steve is America
and you're Arrested Development. It doesn't mean you're bad, it just
means he's not interested in you.
– American Dad
Season 2, Episode 15 (aired May 7, 2006, three months after Arrested
Development’s cancellation)
What a difference seven years makes. Running for just three,
ever-shortening seasons, Arrested Development (Fox, 2003-2006) was an
innovative take on the traditional broadcast sitcom, finding a dedicated but
too small audience when it first aired. The show was comedically loose and
narratively tight: full of visual puns, interwoven storylines, deadpan
deliveries and dark consequences, with many of its funniest gags taking weeks
if not years to play out completely. The ensemble cast was pitch perfect, from
the young Michael Cera as George Michael Bluth, to the veteran Jeffrey Tambor (The
Larry Sanders Show) as his “Pop-Pop” George Sr. and Jessica Walter (Archer) as the passive and not so passive aggressive
Bluth matriarch, to Tony Hale’s perennial man-child ‘Buster’.
Arrested Development has long been for me the gold
standard of our new era of “continuity comedy”, along with the early (and only
the early) seasons of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother. Like How
I Met Your Mother, Arrested was a series that hit the ground
running, absolutely confident of the rules of its narrative
universe and the people that populated it. You can witness all of Arrested
Development’s potential in its opening minutes, which lay out the tone and
even some of the running jokes for years to come. Re-watching the original series is
actually a special delight, as increased familiarity with the characters' past and future histories only deepens the enjoyment.
Critical acclaim couldn’t
trump its struggling ratings however, and Fox pulled the plug on the show in
2006. But like many cancelled-too-soon shows in this age of DVD box sets and
streaming channels, the years have been kind to the series, further expanding
its audience and growing its reputation to near legendary proportions. A year
after Fox cancelled the show,
Time Magazine put
it in its “The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME" list. And in 2011, IGN named it
the funniest television show of all time (edging out Monty Python’s Flying
Circus and Seinfeld for the top spot). Rumours of a new season or
even a reunion movie floated around for years, until November 2011, when Netflix and Arrested creator Mitch
Hurwitz confirmed their intentions to bring the series back, along the entire
original cast and crew, for a new, exclusive fourth season. These, to be sure, are very large shoes to fill (even if they are their own).