Of all the Bluth family members, Lindsay has the most fraught sense of self, the biggest questions about her role in the family. She grew up thinking she was Michael's twin (twinness itself a complication of identity, multiplying it), and then discovered at the end of Season 3 that she was adopted. In "Red Hairing," she approaches her literal identity crisis in a very literal manner: Changing her appearance, or, given the eerie manipulation her face seems to have undergone since 2007, it might be more accurate to say that she's changing it even more. "Who am I?" she frets throughout the episode, trying on different looks and different relationships until, like all Bluths must, she returns to the sea … Cinco de Cuatro, to be specific.
The episode picks up almost exactly where the first Lindsay episode began: at an ostrich farm run by Marky Bark, freegan activist son of Lindsay's one-time protest partner Johnny Bark. Lindsay and Marky met cute, as many couples do, dropping their original partners off at the methadone clinic. Now Lindsay has joined her face-blind, speedy lover at his desert ostrich farm and is experiencing a little sweat-and-squeeze herself. She's so hot she'd "give $20,000 for a lemonade," even as Marky's mother presses her into grimy service as Marky puts pressure onto the neighboring businessmen's retreat that's rubbing up against their property lines.
Gob is a dick. He'd probably be the first to admit it. What's amazing about the character is how much we like him anyway. In previous seasons, he's bedded (or attempted to bed) Michael's girlfriend, he's romanced Lucille Two for her money, he's been the voice of a racist puppet, pretended to kill a stripper, and fired the entire staff of the Bluth company for laughing at him. Yet he's so inept and ultimately so desperate for love and acceptance that his avarice isn't offensive. We know, if he doesn't, that the reason he craves success is to fill that Bluth-family-size hole inside him. His development is less obviously arrested than others in the family, but he's no less a child — he even believes in magic. (A favorite moment from this episode: Gob unloads his drowned stunt animals, explaining how he was going to turn flowers into doves, and doves into rabbits. Tobias interjects, "And rabbits into mice!" Gob deadpans with the seriousness of a believer, not a skeptic: "That can't be done.")
Of the entire Bluth family, Gob has the biggest gap between his selfishness and his haplessness: Lucille might be greedier, but she's also more on the ball; Tobias is comparatively saintly (like the Amazing Jesus!), but he's also almost completely helpless. Gob desperately wants fame, riches, and women, and his egotism would be distasteful but for his inability to actually obtain what he wants — and the pitiful depths (sometimes literally) he sinks to while trying. His awareness of his faults glimmers to the surface only rarely; he doesn't think it's his character flaws that doom him, but his choices: He's not stupid, he's just made a huge mistake.
People forget that when Arrested Development debuted, it was marketed as a comedic spin on the financial scandals of the time — Enron, Global Crossing — not a multilayered postmodern meditation on father-son relationships, identity, and avian behaviors. I remember feeling almost betrayed by the series circling back to quasi-ripped-from-the-headlines comedy with its Bluths-build-in-Iraq story line; Wee Britain was about as far as I wanted the Bluths to travel.
But in retrospect, and upon repeated viewing, the "light treason" subplot doesn't just illustrate the show's fearlessness, it reveals itself to be the through line of the first three seasons, long before Buster joins Army. "Light treason" is, in fact, mentioned in the sixth episode of the first season; the 14th episode of that season is called "Shock and Aww," and features an adoring collage homage to Saddam Hussein; and Gob announces that the company's slogan is "Solid as a rock," in Season 2's second episode. The show satirizes greed and self-centeredness, and reckless intervention, mostly on the level of personal relationships, but the punch lines apply to international ones as well.
All this is to say, of course there's a Herman Cain character — Herbert Love, mentioned previously but actually present in "Double Crossers" — and I suspect that the show will again prove itself to be just as much a story of wealth as it is a story of a wealthy family.
Before we dive into "A New Start," let's get some housekeeping out of the way. First: I have apparently been stubbornly mishearing the moniker of George Michael's privacy software (if that's what it really is). It is not "FaceBlock," but rather "FakeBlock." I still argue that the project fits in with the season's central theme, exploring the nature of identity: What is maintaining one's identity but to "block" what is "fake"? See also: this episode's running joke about copyright infringement and character rights.
And that little grad school semiotics flashback brings me to my next point: I hope this doesn't feel like homework for you guys, but watching the series on my own, constantly searching for hidden themes and self-aware references, largely fueled by coffee and popcorn and dressed in sweatpants — well, at least I'm not racking up any student loans.
This Tobias-centric episode actually leavened what has been becoming less of an Easter egg hunt and more of a forced march through hazily familiar territory. Tobias has always been something of a blank slate, both in terms of his character's background and his character's self-knowledge, and this episode was refreshingly whimsical and untethered in comparison to the freighted story lines we've seen so far. Yes, there were the required callbacks and Tobias's story intersected in the plots we're already aware of, but most of the humor was about Tobias, who really does live in his own little, even wee, world.
"The B. Team" is easily the most self-aware and meta episode thus far, which, four episodes in, doesn't sound like much. But consider how far inside its own navel Arrested Development travels on a regular basis: This episode's mixture of nods and winks is almost distracting, a form of postmodern Tourette's so severe I can't even imagine what a non-fan might make of it. I take notes on the callbacks, call-forwards, and other references while I’m watching, and at this point I think it might be easier to keep track of the jokes anyone would get.
Yet I think this might be the best episode so far, too, but mainly because of the stuff that was easy to follow, not the intertextual filigree you need Google — or, um, "G-----" to get. First of all, it's a Michael episode, and he seems to have returned to the basic competence I complained about missing in the previous episodes. Even more helpfully, the story arc sticks mostly to one period in the Bluth family saga; there's none of the timeline hopscotching that marked the first Michael chapter. Whether or not any of these narrative aides would make the episode more comprehensible to an average viewer, I don't know. Maybe they can fix it in post.
Episode 3 is devoted to Lindsay Bluth, or "the one daughter who had no choice but to keep her life together." I had gathered from online chatter that Portia de Rossi looks, well, different in it, and I can report that this is true: She looks like a whittled-down, melty-Barbie version of Lindsay, something beautiful left too long in the desert sun.
Is it a coincidence or evidence of the show producers' shamanlike powers over narrative that the episode's plot provides some neat existential trapdoors for those who'd like to pretend that there's nothing strange going on here? The episode introduces an opiate addiction plotline, complete with the layers of denial, dissembling, desperation, and extreme weight loss that come with it. When Marky Bark (Chris Diamantopoulos) tells Lindsay she looks like a junkie — "What are you, 90 pounds?" she takes it as compliment. Even more to the point (or more pointedly disguising it), Marky suffers from "face blindness" — a real thing, and either a description of what's going on behind the scenes at Arrested Development or a command to those are watching it.
Did you binge all weekend on the new Arrested Development episodes? To each his own. We're going to slow it down a little. Two episodes per week, one at a time. It's what Mitch would want.
And so now it's George Bluth's story, or, rather: "And now the story of a family whose future was abruptly canceled and the one father who had no choice but to keep himself together. It's George Sr.'s Arrested Development."
George faces a particularly tough assignment in keeping himself together because, of course, there are two of him, and the main challenge of the episode is how to capitalize on his twin brother Oscar for use as an alibi/decoy/dupe.
We open with George leading a pseudo-spiritual sweat lodge ceremony for desperate corporate executives, a riff on his time huckstering Kabbalah-ish nonsense from prison via "Caged Wisdom" tapes and DVDs. After hours in the heat, he used to let the lemonade rule him! Now, having achieved enlightenment, he's willing to share the answers with businessmen thirsty for his secrets: "Come on, Daniels, you ran Bear Stearns, for God's sake!"
Did you binge all weekend on the new Arrested Development episodes? To each his own. We're going to slow it down a little. Two episodes per week, one at a time. It's what Mitch would want.
Great comedy is like an ice cream sundae: There's delicious, fluffy stuff at the top that anyone would like, then there's some more substantial material, and it just gets richer and richer the further you dig down. You are rewarded for patience and persistence with a more complicated and rewarding experience than someone who just licks the whipped cream off the top. And if you gobble too much down in one sitting, you'll probably puke.
Of course, no, not really, though I avoided the Internet all day Sunday just in case the legions of Arrested Development fans who binge-watched Season 4 got all upchucky about the experience. To be sure, there was some sour-breathed curmudgeonliness on display, but for the most part I was, if anything, surprised by the lack of intense reaction, at least on my little corner of the World Wide Web. And then I watched Episode 1 of the long-awaited, much-referenced, cleverly marketed, insanely anticipated series comeback and I understood the "Hmm, OK … " that has greeted it.
So if great comedy is an ice cream sundae, "Flight of the Phoenix" is a frozen banana: It is one of the component ingredients of an ice cream sundae, but it's not quite all the way there.
Believe it or not, new Arrested Development hits the 'flix this Sunday. And how is creator Mitch Hurwitz spending his last few spare moments of pure goodwill and fevered anticipation? By getting out a very important message. While it was previously rumored that the new season could be watched in any order you desired, he's now telling us how it actually works.
For 10 days, Grantland staff writer Rembert Browne is at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, collecting stories while trying not to die.
Beyond all the music shows, and film premieres, and obnoxious start-ups with their obnoxious apps and obnoxious vowel-less names and obnoxious T-shirts and obnoxious dreams of a cloud-based B2B push notification water filtration-augmented reality show, Austin's South by Southwest festival is really a giant exercise in colonization. There is nothing more precious in this town for 10 days than land. Because if you have land, as both Columbus and Trump have taught us, you can do whatever you want.
In the upcoming days, as the music crowd begins to take over Austin, outlets like Fader and Spin and Filter, as well as web entities like Spotify, will acquire spaces for multiple days at a time and proceed to throw events with the entertainers they enjoy, and people will stand in line for hours to finally get the opportunity to step foot on their land. And they will be happy.
One of the entities that will also do this through music, but got a head start during the Interactive portion, was Samsung. What did they decide to do with their land grab?
Invite Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz for a Sunday-brunch Q&A session, as well as actors Will Arnett and Jeffery Tambor.
As Deadline reports, Arrested Development 2.0 — currently scheduled for a spring release via Netflix, that bastion of FNL episodes you've seen 1,000 times and John Malkovich movies you never knew existed — has ceased production. But with good reason! It turns out that, while filming the current 10-episode count, creator Mitch Hurwitz just had too many ideas. He shot more than he had planned to, and the result was story lines he hadn't previously thought of. So then he went to the Netflix people and said, "Hey, you guys like Arrested Development, right?" [Content murmurs.] "How about more of that good good?" [Ear-piercing shrieks.] Netflix signed off on new episodes, for a total of between 12 to 15, and then everyone went about making plans for that to happen. Says Deadline:
