The only characters not to be emotionally broken beyond repair were George Michael and Maeby… they were yet to have their innocence corrupted by the Bluth family. An argument I’ve always made, however, is that Michael was never the straight man in Arrested Development. Wasn’t Michael always the stable centre of Arrested Development? Has the character been altered beyond recognition? Those questions are compounded when cut to him six months earlier living in George Michael’s dorm room, oblivious to the fact that his son doesn’t really want him around. At this point, over six minutes into a 32-minute episode, we finally arrive at the opening titles.Īs well as seeding other plotlines, the main question the introductory sequence wants us to ask is just how did Michael end up in the situation where he owes Lucille II $700k and seems to be a broken man. The two talk, fight, and Gob slips Michael a forget-me-now pill (the birth of a new running joke from the embers of an old one) when his brother sees something he shouldn’t. Then after a nice bit of physical comedy with Liza Minelli, Michael retreats to the old model home where he finds Gob and the audience finds sense of welcome familiarity. When we finally cut to Michael Bluth looking like a shell of his former self, a sense of disorientation pervades. It’s a solid scene but it makes for a clumsy opening, and in a season structured as this is you feel there would have surely been a more appropriate place for it elsewhere. Instead of then catching us up with Michael, we get a flashback to a younger Lucille and George Sr played by Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen – Wiig’s fantastic, Rogen’s fine – explaining the history of the fictional holiday. Ron Howard’s narrator get the first laugh of the season as he croaks out his first few words before coughing and getting back into the swing of things, introducing the audience to the Cinco de Cuatro celebration that serves as one of the three main fulcrum points of the season’s complex narrative. If only to ease us back in (and in the finale tie things up a little more neatly), bookending this season in the same way may have helped.īut hey, that didn’t happen, and this first episode features Michael heavily, although it takes a minute or two to get to him. Most series of that E4 show were bookended by episodes that followed the entire cast, with the episodes in the middle putting the focus on individuals to the same extent that this season of Arrested Development does. Perhaps a better point of comparison then would be Skins, which is a show that did something with the format that I’d have desperately liked Mitch Hurwitz to do here. The last time I can remember being heavily invested in a show that followed a similar format was Lost, although the split between flashbacks and real-time action on that show allowed for a more balanced representation of the ensemble. We’ll get into how well that structure works generally as we make our way through the series run, but specifically in regards to this opening episode, I found it to be a problem. So let’s jump into it, shall we, with the Michael-centric episode, Flight of the Phoenix.Īnd with that immediately we’ve touched on one of the main points of contention regarding these new episodes – their character-centric approach. ![]() The initial plan was for HeyUGuys to review the entirety of Season 4 in one fell swoop, but given how much the episodes seem to differ both in tone and quality throughout the season, we thought we’d instead go for a spoiler-filled episode-by-episode approach. ![]() Opinions were formed, knees were jerked and early assessments seemed to be fairly wide-ranging. Debuting on Netflix in one batch, there was approximately 8 hours and 20 minutes of new footage for fans to consume, and many (myself included, I must admit) blasted through it all in just one day. On Sunday, after a wait of seven years, three months and 16 days no less, Arrested Development finally returned with a fourth season of 15 episodes.
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