Category: television

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 it’s 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!

This first Tobias episode, “A New Start,” pulls double duty in season four: it’s the most explicit illustration yet of why this string of episodes doesn’t work, and it’s a pretty solid promise that it won’t get any better.

It’s a shame, because Tobias is one of the most interesting characters the show has at its disposal. He’s also one of the most reliable in terms of generating comedy. Think about it; he’s funny when he’s unemployed, and he’s funny when he gets a job. He’s funny when he doesn’t land a part, and he’s funny when he does and gets to show off just how bad an actor he is. He’s funny when he’s overconfident, and he’s funny when he’s depressed. He’s funny when he detaches from his family, and he’s funny when he tries to forcibly insert himself. (DOES THAT SOUND GAY IT’S KIND OF A RUNNING JOKE.)

He’s a never-nude, a failed actor, a failed doctor, a failed husband, a failed father, a potentially latent homosexual, and he’s prone to unintentional wordplay, dressing up in silly costumes and breaking into characters of his own creation at a moment’s notice.

So why — why — does this season struggle so much to find something to do with him? You can do anything with Tobias. As Maeby would say, this was a freebie.

Or it should have been anyway. Instead we get another episode, like Lindsay’s “Indian Takers” before it, that has no idea of how to get from point A to point B, so instead we just get meandering glimpses of points D, H, T, M and X in the hopes that we’ll be too baffled to notice. None of it adds up to anything that feels connected in any way, let alone a coherent story. No, some recurring wordplay about rocks and invisibility don’t count…those should be neat verbal flourishes as a reward for paying attention, not a substitute for an even superficial understanding of how an episode of television needs to work.

Things (haha, I said “thing,” and Tobias is dressed as The Thing, so I guess I just wrote an episode too!) start off poorly, and only get worse from there, with Tobias appearing on some local version of To Catch a Predator. Remember all those funny things about Tobias that I listed above? How silly of me not to mention the pedophilia he’s so well known for.

What’s that? This has never been something associated with the character before? Silly me, assuming they’d want to write a full episode about who Tobias is, rather than as a build up to some nonsensical gag that has nothing to do with anything we know about him. I’m a boob.

I’m not saying the Predator scene isn’t funny…I’m a sucker for stupid sex jokes. But why are we suddenly mining pedophilia for a reason to laugh at Tobias?

Early in the episode, Lindsay clumsily (from a writing standpoint) says that Tobias being gay is sort of a running joke in the family. Setting that up, there are two obvious things the episode can do: it can have Tobias struggle to be more careful with his word choices so that he doesn’t appear gay, or it can embrace that and have him disregard Lindsay’s advice entirely and just blurt out all manner of unintentional dick jokes. In short, the episode said something that’s never been spoken quite so clearly before…why then, if that’s the “running joke” obnoxiously spelled out for us, do we abandon that entirely and end up structuring a climax around something entirely different?

Perhaps if Tobias were coming to see George Michael instead of Maeby it would have fit a little better. After all, not only is Tobias not a pedophile, but he’s also not supposed to be interested in women. Having him come over to ostensibly diddle a little girl is about as far from the Tobias we know as it’s possible to get…and now that I’ve spelled that out I’m kind of convinced that any laughter I gave that scene was far too generous.

But that’s just the start…it really only gets worse from there. Quite how anyone could watch these episodes and not see an enormous step down in quality of writing is beyond me, especially in the face of the first act of “A New Start,” which is literally non-stop narration for around nine minutes.

That’s exhausting, and that’s extremely sloppy. It feels very much like footage was shot with little or no mind paid to how it would eventually be worked into the show, so we end up with long stretches like this wherein the narrator just has to tell us about everything they didn’t think to shoot…which turns out to be a lot.

In this case it’s Tobias going to India with Lindsay, though neither of them realize it. That’s the long and short of it, and nine minutes’ worth of narration isn’t going to convince me that it’s any more clever than that single sentence made it sound.

While in India Tobias breaks his skull a few times, inspiring him (again) to become an actor since he has a gift for making people laugh. Nevermind the fact that rolling off a hospital bed is about the least funny bit of physical comedy we’ve ever gotten from Tobias…we’re not supposed to pay attention to that.

So he comes home and we get more of the other half of “Indian Takers,” which would be great if it filled in the gaps that this earlier episode needed in order to feel like a story, but instead we just splinter it further with stream-of-consciousness plotting that leads to Tobias and DeBrie standing on street corners dressed like two members of The Fantastic Four.

That’s another thing we love about Tobias, right? The way he dresses up like comic book characters and spends entire episodes writing musicals about them?

No?

Well, tough, because that happens anyway. Can’t wait.

I do want to talk a bit about DeBrie, though, because with Maria Bamford behind her I really did expect this to go somewhere. It never did, and that confused and disappointed me, but I think I figured out why.

I Googled her to find out how to spell the character’s name, and found some casting reports for Arrested Development season four, in which Bamford mentions she’s in the show, but doesn’t say much about who she plays, because it’s “a small part.”

That says a lot, I think. If she believed she was playing a small part, of course she’d let her character remain a cartoon. She probably only expected to be cut to now and again as a sort of punchline in itself.

In reality, though, she’s a major character this season…and that’s probably something Bamford didn’t expect. And which also suggests footage was shot in advance of knowing where any of it would go, or what it would actually be. Season four feels like it was born in the edit, and not in a “lightning in a bottle” sense. It feels dead and disjointed, with stitches of narration trying, and failing, to hold all the disparate pieces together.

Tobias was never a one-joke character, but he was definitely a series of easy jokes. That’s okay. In the third series of The League of Gentlemen, the sketch comedy troupe took a handful of broad characters and gave them each deeper, episode-length stories that stripped away the general gags they were known for and explored who they were as people. It can be done, and The League of Gentlemen had the writing and acting chops to take silly characters that we knew from two- and three-minute skits and give them humanity…without ever being less funny while doing so.

What’s more, that third series consisted of episodes that focused on one character apiece, and by the end of the series managed to come together and tell a greater story as well.

Arrested Development‘s fourth season could have learned a lot from that, because the more time we spend with these characters the less recognizably human they get, and the bigger the story it tries to tell, the more it gets mired in go-nowhere nonsense.

The comedy in this show always seemed so natural and effortless. Please, stop trying so hard.

Episode 5: “A New Start”
Central Character: Tobias
Other Family Appearances: Lindsay, GOB, Maeby
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: Tobias saying “Hothothot” in India was the only specific callback I noticed, but it was the lest terrible thing about that sequence.
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: Tobias wearing his sheet in various silly ways in the bathroom, which I believe was a scene cut from a Warden Gentles episode of Rocko’s Modern Life.
Best Line / Exchange:

TOBIAS: All you need to do is tell people what a terrific actor I am, because I can’t do it believably.

It might have taken four seasons to get us there, but “The B. Team” at long last makes good on Michael’s life-long dream to get into the motion picture industry.

No, wait, let me rephrase that: For no reason whatsoever, we get an episode that crams Michael into the motion picture industry.

There’s a lot that’s strange about this episode, but perhaps the most glaring is that if Arrested Development wanted to make jokes about Imagine Entertainment and Jerry Bruckheimer, they already had someone working in the business: Maeby. For no particular narrative reason that I can fathom, this episode fires her and subs Michael in instead.

This is disappointing in a few ways, one of which is that Maeby’s entire character arc gets derailed abruptly, and another is that this probably would have been much funnier if it had been Maeby helming the project rather than Ron Howard (season three ended with her working on this exact project anyway) and Michael taking his role in the process much too seriously.

He still could have been tasked with collecting signatures, he still could bump into Rebel Alley, and he still could assemble his team and give the “already built” speech. A silly story could have flowed naturally from everything we’ve already seen, and give another family member something to do. Instead, we take a moment to dismantle everything so we can start fresh with the silliness, and that feels like a big step backward.

I mentioned earlier that I avoided spoilers while watching these episodes. I finished the season a few days ago, however, and I can say this conclusively: it’s impossible to spoil anything, because nothing actually happens.

Oh, sure, you could spoil a joke here or there. Or you can reveal the identity of someone off camera. But as far as narrative: there isn’t one. We’ll get into this much more in later reviews, but it applies here too; for all the hubbub and importance surrounding narrative developments this season, none of them actually go anywhere.

Which is why, I guess, we have an episode about Michael Bluth assembling a team…which does nothing and not one member of which we’ll see again. It’s probably also why Michael gets a job (which with uncharacteristic and evasive vagueness is never revealed) with Google, so he can drive a funny car and the narrator can make jokes about how they can’t mention the name Google. It’s all very funny if you’ve never seen Arrested Development before this season and therefore have no idea how much better these concepts can be handled.

This season is playing out like an imitator of itself. It’s like seeing one of those trailers for an indie film made by somebody who knows Wes Anderson is popular but doesn’t seem to know why, so he ends up packing his film with the funny costumes and the deadpan delivery and the quirky soundtrack but never quite gets around to writing a good script, piecing together a memorable story or understanding the artistry behind why a great filmmaker makes those decisions in the first place.

The difference is that Arrested Development is still made by the same people, which is what’s confusing. It’s almost like Hurwitz and crew turned to the first three seasons for inspiration, but just latched onto the superficial things (left-field sight gags, jokey narration, guest stars) and never managed to get at anything that made their own show great.

That’s about 700 words of one thing before I get around to revealing another, though: I kind of like “The B. Team.” In fact, this is the last episode through which I was able to retain the illusion that season four might have promise. It was all down hill from here.

It’s not a great episode of television, or even a good one. As I mentioned, none of this goes anywhere. Not within the context of the episode, and at no time later. It upends one character’s arc so another can take her place, when it really would have been smoother and more logical to keep her there. And, strangest of all, the story doesn’t spring forth from anything we know about Michael at all.

Taken in conjunction with “Flight of the Phoenix,” this latter point is especially glaring. That episode was about both his relationship with his son and his failure with Sudden Valley…two very important things to Michael, and the two areas in which failure would feel most cutting to him. In short, it allows him to be a character.

Then we got George Sr., whose episode was about his relationship with Oscar, a scam business, and defrauding the U.S. Government. Again, very George Sr.

Lindsay’s episode was a mess, but then again so was her plastic surgery. Oops! I mean, so was her character. She’s flightly and impulsive, and even if the episode was a trainwreck it was at least true to aspects of her character.

Now Michael is a film producer. And soon Tobias will create a musical about The Fantastic Four. And Lucille will guest star with some shrill Asian women on a reality show. Arrested Development season four will remind us over and over again that any handle it initially seemed to have on its characters was purely coincidental.

So why do I like “The B. Team?” Because it at least has some good gags, and if you forget (or don’t know) that none of this goes anywhere and we might as well watch Michael on a treadmill for 30 minutes, it at least feels like it’s giving the season some direction.

But most of all, here’s what I like: Kitty Sanchez. Carl Weathers. Warden Gentles. Andy Richter. In one fell swoop the show brings back characters that are characters, and it’s such a refreshing taste after China Garden and Marky Bark. Perhaps — it even seems to suggest — those boobish cartoons can one day be remembered as fondly as these old hands. You know that smile you got on your face when Carl Weathers helped himself to a Grinch doll? Maybe one day you’ll be just as happy to see your old pal China Garden!

Yeah, not likely. The reason it’s so nice to see these characters again isn’t just because they were great enough characters that we missed them, but because it means there isn’t any room for the lesser creations of season four to intrude on our fun.

We do get to meet one other new face, though: Rebel Alley. It’s not glaring here in her first appearance, but with the benefit of hindsight I can say I’m disappointed that she also doesn’t have much character. Compared to past season-long romances like Marta or Rita, there’s nothing going on with this character, and no particular reason that Michael would fall for her particularly, any more than he’d fall for any attractive woman.

Sure, he says she reminds him of his dead wife (real artful way of bringing that back, too) but that’s never been why Michael’s chased girls in the past. I would have preferred there to be something more to it than the fact that Michael gets a boner when he sees redheads.

Oh well. It may not get us anywhere, but Warden Gentles failing to get the hang of his iPad is worth the half hour in itself. It’s a little frustrating that the most serialized season of the show refuses to actually go anywhere, but as long as we can keep having fun along the way, I’m happy.

Spoiler: We don’t keep having fun along the way.

Episode 4: “The B. Team”
Central Character: Michael
Other Family Appearances: Maeby, George Sr., Tobias
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: “She’s British so she doesn’t seem…nobody can ever tell that she’s disabled.”
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: Pretty much any exchange with Ron Howard could do to be tightened up.
Best Line / Exchange:

ANDY: Help me remember. What did we do together?
MICHAEL: You came over for a chicken and hamwater dinner that my family threw to raise some funds for itself.
ANDY: And they’re finally getting around to making a movie about that, huh?