Before we were burned too many times by FOX TV to invest time in any new show, Mindy and I adored Arrested Development. We cheered the Bluth family, and did our best to evangelize the show before it was buried by the network (in a two hour block against a Winter Olympics opening ceremony, no less). Despite various rumors, I never thought it would come back before Netflix made the big announcement--new episodes, to premiere simultaneously!
We spent the last few days bingeing on our AD DVD's in order to fully catch up (6-8 episodes a day) before digging into the new Netflix episodes. In retrospect, that might have been a mistake--the original episodes are far better. I suppose you can't go home again. So far, we've made it through 6 of the 15 new episodes, and it's not promising.
- First off, I keep getting the same feeling I have when watching "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"--the characters are only supposed to be 18 months older, but 10 actual years had elapsed since the original series. The Bluths have the same problem--it's hard to see them in a scene that supposedly occurs on the same day as the final episode.
- Speaking of looks, Portia de Rossi swears she had no plastic surgery, but it's hard to reconcile that with Lindsey's face on the new shows. Perhaps it's a joke--that she's made up to look like Lindsey had botched surgery in the interim?
- While there are some flashes of brilliance (Cinco de Quatro, C.W. Swappigan's barter restaurant, Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen as young Lucille and George), the whole thing doesn't hold together. Creator Mitch Hurwitz mentioned in an interview that, at one point, he wanted to do a a kind of "hyperlinked" show, where you could watch it in whatever order you wanted, and the final product still has that sense. It's disjointed.
- While the show was always mean and featured some unlikeable characters, there's a much darker take here. Michael, in particular, at least tried to do the right thing before, but that's no longer the case. What he puts George Michael through is painful to watch.
- In the earlier shows, the characters seemed to have a "Teflon" quality--terrible things happened (mostly self-inflicted), but things turned out OK in the end. Now, the cast has gone to what Community would call "the darkest timeline".
- They are really packing in the stunt casting, aren't they? I'm sure everyone wanted in Hollywood wanted a role, but we're spending more time IMDBing some guy in the background--"isn't he from…?"--than watching the main action.
- Ron Howard (until now just an unseen narrator) got most of an episode to himself playing a studio mogul. That wore thin fairly quickly--Opie was never a great actor.
- However, I can't get enough of young Barry Zuckerkorn--played by Henry Winkler's son Max.
- Most obscure reference so far--the cheap Fantastic Four movie from the 1990's (it actually happened, although Roger Corman produced it, not Ron Howard).
Hopefully, the remaining episodes will turn things around. Arrested Development is available on Netflix.
