![]() ![]() The new season returns to it single-timeline roots and takes up its business directly on the heels of the fourth, the five-year real-world hiatus not withstanding. In 2013, we were not yet living in a world of revivals something clever seemed to be called for. It was a one-time-only experiment that seemed designed to answer the question, “How do we do something different now that we’ve been away for five years and are coming back as a streaming series?” The puzzle-piece aspect of the show was taken a step further in structuring the fourth season, where the same story was told following a different character in each episode. In one of the new season’s best conceits, Michael’s niece Maeby is hiding out as an old Jewish woman in a fancy retirement home. Usually, one of them is imprisoned, or in disguise, or being impersonated by someone else. With the exception of Michael and George-Michael, whose attempts to be bad go awry as reliably as his attempts to do good, the Bluths are variously dishonest, deluded, incorrigible and incompetent one of them is typically trying to get even with another one of them, or all of them - though they are not without feelings and a need to be loved. It is a devilish contraption, a finely worked out farce that marshals the classic tools of mistaken identities, misheard statements, cross purposes, backfiring deceptions and a desire for sex into a modern serial sitcom. But this dynamic is woven into the fabric of “Arrested Development” more tightly than usual a line of narration sums up the Bluth dilemma nicely: “Resentful of his family, Michael came up with a plan to make them come back.” They are a television family, which is to say, they are fated to remain more or less in one another’s company - to share sitcom space, at least, if not always scenes - driven apart and drawn together until the day they are forever canceled or their makers let them go. The series, created by Mitchell Hurwitz, remains loosely organized around Michael Bluth (Bateman), the relatively normal son (with a relatively normal son of his own, George-Michael Bluth, played by Michael Cera), whose periodic attempts to distance himself from his family ever fail: “You always come back to save the family, Michael,” his brother Buster (Tony Hale) says this season. (Viewers will recall that Gob is in love with fellow magician Tony Wonder, played by Ben Stiller.) It’s not fatal to the show, but you will make up your own mind about that. That’s especially true during a storyline in which Tambor, as patriarch George Bluth, and his bad magician son, Gob (Will Arnett), agree to cut a sexual swath across Mexico, although each is lying to the other about wanting to do it. That Tambor has been let go from Jill Soloway’s Amazon series “Transparent” after allegations of sexual harassment also makes watching the new season strange at times. (Portia de Rossi, who had decided to stop acting before production of the current season began but agreed to appear in five episodes, did not take part.) Apologies were subsequently issued, but a wary Netflix nixed a planned promotional trip to England. The new season - its fifth since 2003, again on Netflix - was negatively heralded by a much-discussed group interview in the New York Times, in which male cast members, led by Jason Bateman, seemed to defend, even to mansplain, the behavior of Jeffrey Tambor, who had been verbally abusive to Jessica Walter. ![]() The show now appears with the frequency of new U2 albums. Mitchell Hurwitz and Will Arnett in “Arrested Development.” (Courtesy Saeed Adyani/Netflix/TNS)įive years after the return of “Arrested Development” as a Netflix series, which came seven years after it was canceled as a Fox sitcom, “Arrested Development” returned again this week to follow the misadventures of the Bluths of Newport Beach. ![]()
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