TV Review: Arrested Development, Season 4
After a long, long hiatus, Arrested Development as returned for another season with mixed results. If you’re unfamiliar, Arrested Development was on Fox in the early 2000’s and was cancelled due to low ratings. But it built a strong cult following and has done extremely well on DVD, so Netflix decided to pick the show up and bring all the original cast members back.
The main problem is that now that most of the cast has moved on to much bigger things, particularly Michael Cera and Jason Bateman, the show now focuses on only one character per episode, with only occassional interaction between cast members. The chemistry between all the characters is what made the original series so great, so without that constant interaction, something is missing.
Basically, some of the episodes are hilarious, possibly some of the best stuff in the show’s history, while other episodes are just not funny at all. The episodes that feature Michael and his son George Michael are particularly good, but unfortunately are few and far between. The episodes centered around George, Sr. didn’t make me laugh once. The lone ‘Maybe’ episode was suprisingly funny. Tobias, normally one of my favorite characters, didn’t really do it for me this time around.
Some of the episodes’ story arcs were really just too ridiculous to be funny. Michael Bluth trying to get a Hollywood movie made about that Bluth family, George, Sr. starting a sweat lodge in the California desert, are just a couple of examples. Also, there were so many winks at the original episodes that it seems hard for this new season to stand on its own two feet.
My two favorite characters, GOB and Michael, shared very little screen time together, which is too bad because they are always funny when they interact. To me, it seems like if they can’t get the cast to come back and do the show right, why do it at all? I’m glad they did another season, and it definitely had it’s moments, but it really wasn’t as good as it could have been if they had been able to get all the pieces to line up correctly.
The season’s final few episodes are probably the best, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, which means that their will likely either be another season or possibly a movie in the future. I’d be fine with that, but I’d hope that next time around they can find a way to get some of these characters in the same room.