Arrested Development, Season 4. Who's seen it? (Bonus: post a picture of a "hot mess")
I've seen it. It took three days. Now as for that mess...
The almost archetypal example
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the weekend it came out. Now I'm gonna watch them again because my wife is mad ai watched them without her. I tried not to but I couldn't. Netflix makes it too easy to hit the next episode.
I'm working my way through the original series before I move on to the new ones.
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To be honest, I was very disappointed. I'd been looking forward to it for so long, but it really left me flat.
Where to start? Well, the story lines were just so weak. I never even figured out what that whole wall thing was about, and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't written to be deliberately unfathomable. The George/Oscar portion was, frankly, awful. Lindsay's story was pretty lame as well.
Next, it was disturbing to see Michael being such a loser. In the series, he was the glue of normalcy that held the rest of those nincompoops together. But in this season he was just as bad as they were and that was a let down. And I hated that final scene with him and George Michael - HATED IT!!
Actually, all of the storylines for the characters were lame, except for Tobias who is always hysterical.
I think the biggest problem for me was how disjointed it all was. I know they had to film it the way they did because of the actor's schedules, which made it almost impossible for them to all be in the same place at the same time. But that's what made the series so great, when they would all join at Lucille's or the model home and play off each other. What we got here was, at most, two of the characters in a scene together, and I think the show really suffered for it. A lot of times the actors were filmed in front of a green screen and then later dropped into whichever scene they were in. I think alot of the Cinco de Quatro was filmed this way. A hilarious name by the way, and so reminiscent of the greatness of the series.
On the plus side, Jessica Walter is a scream no matter what she does. No one could play Lucille Bluth like her, except for maybe Kristen Wiig, who was absolutely perfect as young Lucille. I liked seeing John Slattery, too. And some of the old gags resurfacing were pretty good too - like "Mr. F", the stair truck, Tobias bluing himself, "her?", etc. I got a few good laughs out of it.
I always had to watch the original series episodes more than once because there were so many jokes I just couldn't keep up with them. But season four was so bad that I have no desire to even try to watch again. There's been talk of a movie at some point in the future, and Ron Howard certainly seems to be setting up a scenario for that, but man I hope they can do it better next time.
