New Developments

It's been about a week and a half since Netflix unveiled the new, fourth season of Arrested Development. I know people who binge watched them all that day, and others who have only just started to go through them. I fall somewhere between the extremes, having just finished all 15 episodes a couple of nights ago. Acknowledging that probably nothing could have lived up to the quality of the original three seasons of the series, nor the 7 years of anticipation that have built up since then, I still have to say that these new episodes, while good overall, were not "great."

In the plus column, the humor of Arrested Development is still intact, and very clever. Episodes are loaded with callbacks, in-jokes, broad comedy, wordplay, and everything in between. The writers don't intend for you to catch every joke the first time through, just the same as the original three seasons, and they're willing to wait for you do go back and mine the new layers they've worked in.

All the actors are back, and they still know their characters oh-so-well. The writing was always great on classic Arrested Development, but it was the work of the skilled cast that made it soar. Seven years later, they aren't missing a beat as they slip back into their old roles.

But part of the problem is that it is seven years later, and many of these actors have moved on to other things. Most of them are actively working on other projects, and simply weren't available at the drop of a hat to come back and make more Arrested Development, no matter how much they may have wanted to. This limited availability of the actors led to the unusual construction of season 4: each episode is centered on one character. Some episodes are missing certain characters entirely, and some characters (particularly Maeby and Buster) seem barely in the season at all.

This damages the show in a few subtle ways. First, we miss out on the full spectrum of character interactions. Classic Arrested Development was always mixing and matching characters in fun ways; in this batch of 15 episodes, some characters hardly say more than a few words to one another. We also get only one ensemble scene in the entire run, depriving us of the series' fun group scenes in which each character is chiming in with his own selfish thread.

Second, some characters just aren't as able to carry a full episode on their own. People might debate about who their favorite character is... and they may even change their minds from one episode to the next. But sometimes a little of one character goes a long way. There are dry spots in the Lindsay episodes, for example; and the first of two George Sr. episodes is one long dry spot from beginning to end.

Of course, the slow spots are not always just because of the characters. It's sometimes about the run time too. The first three seasons of Arrested Development had to fit into a brisk 22 minutes to make room for commercials. Every episode of this new batch is at least 30 minutes long, and some are even pushing the 40 minute mark. And it turns out that sometimes, there can be "too much of a good thing." Some jokes that fall flat are left in, when they never would have made a 22-minute cut.

All that said, this new crop of episodes is funny a lot more often than not. I loved the very first episode, and the opening 5 minutes in particular I found a wonderful welcome back to everything I loved about Arrested Development. The two Gob episodes were great, as were the late-in-season Maeby and Buster episodes. This new season did a wonderful job of incorporating many great secondary characters from the original run, and had a great time with new characters too. (I personally enjoyed seeing "Ron Howard" poke fun at himself, while the "narrator" remained a separate persona.)

All in all, I would say these new episodes were strong enough to keep the overall reputation of Arrested Development intact... while at the same time, not being as good as the original run. I'd give season 4 as a whole a B+.