We’re now more than halfway through the season so I think it’s fair to pose a question: is this bad Arrested Development, or is this bad television?

The easiest way to answer that is to strip away the title and the names of the characters. If I’m left with everything that happens here, every written line and editing choice, but it’s not attached to the name Arrested Development, do I like it?

I don’t. In fact, my fondness for the original three seasons isn’t working against this batch of aimless, meandering tales; it’s making me work harder to like it. I don’t want to admit the fact that they’re not very good, because I want Arrested Development to be above that.

Above this.

If I were to stumble on this exact season of episodes on television (or Netflix, I guess) and it had no attachment to this show, I’d probably feel like it was made by some cynical executive somewhere who wanted to cash in on the popularity of Arrested Development but didn’t have any sense of why people actually liked it. I’d probably come away from it feeling confused and embarrassed for him, and there’s no way I’d make it through fifteen episodes.

But here I am, trying, rewatching, sticking with it, searching for anything, because I want to like this.

It’s not working, though. The more time I spend with these episodes, the less charitable I feel toward them. This is bad television.

“Red Hairing” is yet another good example of why. Like “Indian Takers” before it, the second Lindsay episode is a jumble of events that go nowhere. I’d be tempted to use the sound and fury comparison but there’s not much of either of those things here. If there were sound and fury it might at least be fun. Instead it’s just…stuff. And it’s not funny, and it’s not smart, and it’s entirely too long, and it’s in serious need of editing. It’s bad television.

I know what you’re thinking: Philip, you crazy man. I can’t get enough of that Herbert Love and his extended non-jokes. He’s a great addition to the cast and I’m very happy his arc reaches no conclusion whatsoever, because that just means we’ll get more of him in season five. But here’s my concern: how does his role in this show fit in with that of my beloved Marky Bark?!

Well, good news, person who will never exist: “Red Hairing” answers that question. It doesn’t do much else, but let’s give credit where credit is due.

Marky doesn’t like Herbert Love, because Marky is a hippie (in case you didn’t get that from all the times they say Marky is a hippie instead of making jokes) and Herbert Love is a politician (in case you didn’t get that from all the times they say Herbert Love is a politician instead of making jokes). With a pairing like that, the scripts just write themselves!

So Marky decides to detonate an ink bomb which will ruin Herbert Love’s suit, I guess. It’s not very clear what he hopes to accomplish and it’s even less clear what he could possibly accomplish, so let’s just assume it’s an inflated dry cleaning bill. Only the bomb goes off on Marky instead, so he can turn blue and Lindsay can repeat a joke from the show’s glory years in a way that makes no grammatical sense whatsoever, and then he goes to jail, and then he’s not in jail anymore. Man, it sure is nice to have Marky around again, huh?

“Red Hairing” does fill in some blanks from other episodes, though. For instance, it reveals that George Sr. wanted something from Michael in exchange for signing the release, which comes as a huge surprise because…no, wait. It’s not surprising at all, because it’s exactly what we already knew he wanted in “Double Crossers.”

Oh, well at least the episode also reveals that the ostrich that attacked Lucille 2 in “A New Start” wasn’t actually trying to hurt her; it was in heat so it was attempting to rape her instead and that’s much funnier.

Oh…wait. It’s actually really stupid. Oops.

When a female ostrich is trying to drive its non-existent ostrich cock into Liza Minelli for the sake of a laugh, you know the show is desperate, and nothing about “Red Hairing” disproves that. And here’s a fun little tidbit: if you’re wondering why it’s called “Red Hairing,” it’s because Lindsay wears a red wig for a little while, and then doesn’t anymore. It’s every bit as riveting as Marky’s plot.

Spending so much time with both Marky Bark and Herbert Love in the same episode goes a long way toward emphasizing how pointless the characters are. They have nothing to do, so they do nothing. In an episode that’s almost 40 minutes long. And we watch them do it. For almost 40 minutes.

We do have some nice moments here. Maeby calling her mother a whore has genuine bite to it, and Michael on the phone with George Michael is also nice, as they both lie to each other about not being able to make it to dinner.

Of course, this being Arrested Development season four, we have to reprise that latter situation later in the season to drag it out, make it less funny, eliminate all heart from the situation, and repeatedly spell out something the audience grasped long ago.

The first three seasons of this show were densely packed little puzzles, with a simple narrative playing out overtop of the cleverness and tricky structure. That’s why it was fun to watch the first time, and rewarding to watch again and again. At first you laughed. Then you went back and laughed at all the stuff you missed because you were laughing the first time. Then you went back more and more to find all the stuff you didn’t notice enough to laugh at before. And there was heart, and social satire, and brilliant character interplay.

Here, we replace all that with long humorless stretches of literally nothing, single jokes that get hammered into the ground so completely that you’re sick of them by the time the episode ends (so much for rewatching) and unintelligent “reveals” that just explain things we already knew or give us a lame punchline that was gracelessly withheld the first time around.

It wouldn’t be fair if I just compared this to the first three seasons, said it’s not as good, and dismissed it completely. Instead, though, forget stacking it up against the first three seasons…the mistakes made by this batch of episodes is just bad television period.

It would have been nice if season four could hold its own against the classic years, but even if it didn’t, it could chart a new identity for itself, and work as some kind of noble experiment at the very least. As it stands, though, I’m glad this is on Netflix, because it genuinely doesn’t deserve to be on TV.

Also, what was that Annyong thing at the end? I have to assume they shot the scene with the assumption that they’d figure out a joke for it later, then couldn’t figure one out and just slapped it in anyway.

That’s not the show I remember, and that’s not a show I’d even watch.

Episode 8: “Red Hairing”
Central Character: Lindsay
Other Family Appearances: Lucille, George Sr., Maeby, Michael, George Michael (voice)
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: “He blue himself.” There’s absolutely no reason to revisit the finish-each-other’s-sandwiches gag either, except that it happened once, and therefore we need to be reminded that yes, the writers like to quote this show too!
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: Herbert Love’s date with Lindsay turns into Herbert Love showing off his rhyming skills and pickup lines for the camera, and if you can reasonably tell me why that belongs in the episode I’ll be hugely impressed.
Best Line / Exchange:

LINDSAY: Honestly, Lucillie 2, you’ve been like a mother to me. Except kind, and loving, and willing to let me eat.

Disappointed by season four so far? Don’t worry Arrested Development fans! This show knows exactly how to get you back on board: a series of interlocking episodes focused around the political aspirations of a minor character we’ve never heard of before!

I’ll probably have more to say about this when we get to the final episode, but the most puzzling thing about this season is how much importance it gives to certain events and characters that have literally no impact on anything and that go absolutely nowhere. Here we meet Herbert Love, but we don’t learn anything about him except that he’s not a good character and not particularly funny.

Evidently he’s prone to gaffes and saying inappropriate things, but none of this is presented in a funny enough way to make it worth having in a sitcom, nor is it clever enough to serve as political commentary. He’s just a guy in a suit and some glasses, and that’s apparently what passes for character development at this stage in the game.

“Double Crossers” spends a lot of time talking about Herbert Love and whether or not he’s going to support the wall George Sr. wants to build between the United States and Mexico, in order to stick it to Sitwell and pocket some sweet government dough. So I hope you like lots of humorless scheming about political bribery, government support for construction projects, and fund juggling, because otherwise there’s not going to be much for you here.

The focus on Love is a bizarre one, even moreso than the focus on Marky Bark, DeBrie or Rebel Alley. In those cases yes the characters stink, but at least they’re portrayed as being important to the characters we do care about. Here he’s just a politician that people talk about sometimes, and though their paths do independently cross his own, he ultimately has no impact on anything that happens this season. Maybe he would have if we had gotten any kind of resolution for the 15 episodes’ worth of tail-chasing, but as it stands he just shows up, dominates a few scenes without ever making it clear why he should be important to us, and then vanishes completely with an implied middle finger raised to the audience who might have expected him to do something.

When fans asked for more Arrested Development, it was pretty clearly because they felt there was more mileage in these characters. We didn’t just want Michael and Maeby and Lucille back because we liked staring blankly at them…we wanted them back because we knew there was so much more they could do, more stories to tell, more twisted interaction to be enjoyed. So it’s a bit frustrating that when the show did come back it felt a lot more like The Continuing Adventures of Congressman Nobody, with special guests the Bluths.

Even worse is that once again the writers don’t know what to do with a character in his own spotlight episode. Hot on the heels of Tobias reprising his classic pedophile cosplay routine, we have George Sr. driving in circles and cross-dressing while Oscar fucks his wife. In other words, nothing happens.

Well, that’s not quite true. He signs Michael’s release for the film, gives some money to the Love campaign, and gets chased around by some bees so that the whole sweat hut story from “Borderline Personalities” can be stopped abruptly (we wouldn’t want to accidentally see something through this season, would we?). It’s terrible plotting, and I’m genuinely shocked that an episode in which so much doesn’t happen still has a mountain of filler.

The one potentially interesting thing about this episode is that George Sr. and Oscar begin to change places in a whole other way: George Sr. feels more sensitive and remorseful, while Oscar becomes more sure of himself and aggressive. But while the idea is raised by the episode it never becomes explicit and — say it with me now — it goes absolutely nowhere, so I’m not even sure how much of that is deliberate. Further muddying the water is the fact that George Sr.’s personality change is down to low levels of testosterone, just to prevent you from concluding that it might have something to do with good writing.

I’ve heard it said that these episodes improve upon rewatching, but without exception I’m enjoying them even less the more I see them. I think people are a bit too impressed by the fact that certain scenes in one episode continue through another, but that’s not enough for me. Cheap editing tricks and shuffled timelines are no substitute for cleverness, and the way it’s handled here isn’t as rewarding as it should be.

Earlier in the season I mentioned a scene that pulls out to reveal Buster screeching, then is reprised later with a second pull out to reveal GOB groaning. That’s the way this should work…layered jokes that add to or expand upon the joke each time we see them. But that’s the exception for Arrested Development season four, and instead what we usually get is a scene trimmed abruptly so that later on we hear some more dialogue or have a pointless little detail explained retroactively. It tries to put on a good show, but its really nothing more than a deliberate muddle that doesn’t actually enrich the final product.

A good example of that would be Tobias and Lindsay meeting with the Realtor in “Indian Takers.” Tobias motions toward his license plate, the Realtor looks and reacts. Our view of the license plate is deliberately obscured. Then, in “A New Start,” we see the same scene again, but we can read the license plate, which says ANUSTART. Ho ho ho.

That doesn’t work, because there is no joke the first time. We don’t get a single joke that plays in multiple ways…we get a single joke that we’re not allowed to see until later. Obscuring the license plate isn’t clever…it just eats up time in an episode when we’re going to see the scene play out properly in another episode, effectively doubling the amount of wasted time in a season already too aimless. That’s not an impressively structured reveal; it’s just gets off on being withholding.

Something similar happens here. We hear a crowd chanting “Put up the wall!” on Cinco de Cuatro, and later we find out it’s Lindsay leading that chant. Does it matter? Not really, because it just feels like an out-of-nowhere development in an episode that desperately needed an ending, and the fact that we later learn it’s Lindsay doesn’t change that, or add to it, in any way.

Oh well. Why am I talking about other episodes and general problems? Because I might as well. Nothing of any merit even happens in “Double Crossers.” Even the title suggests a better episode than what we actually have. Oscar sleeps with Lucille, yes, but that’s happened before…and it’s been handled far more interestingly than it is here. (And, again, it goes literally nowhere.) And George Sr. first wants Love to support the wall, then he wants him against it…but I don’t think that qualifies as a double cross, and it’s certainly nothing we should care about. Herbert Love is a non-character with fictional political opinions running in a race that doesn’t even play out during the course of the season, and I can’t think of anything more inconsequential than that.

We do get a pretty nice scene with GOB and Michael though, which just might remind you of the kind of thing the show does when it has some sense of what it’s doing. (GOB breaking the countertop also feels like a lost moment from the classic years.) And since the next episode is GOB’s…well, that can only be a good thing. Right?

Right?

Hello…?

Episode 6: “Double Crossers”
Central Character: George Sr.
Other Family Appearances: Lucille, GOB, Lindsay, Michael, Buster
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: “No, I mean it’s good to be out of that sweaty old hot-box at the compound.” George Sr. singing “All You Need Is Smiles” comes close, since that happens only because it’s a song that was once in another episode and there was nowhere else to put it, or the protracted “Bees?!” reprise.
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: Everything with the pointless Herbert Love should have been tightened right out of the season. Dr. Norman’s “here’s my character’s only joke again and again” spotlight scene isn’t much better. Then there’s GOB and Michael having their right-of-way argument. Boy, you’d almost think rigid timeslots weren’t such a bad thing…
Best Line / Exchange:

GEORGE SR.: I cry at the drop of a hat. And I hate the way I look. I actually had one cute hat, and it blew off in the CVS parking lot and this whole car full of black kids ran over it. For no reason!