You can't choose your family.
You're born, you grow up, you learn the way of the world. You look up to your parents and take on their lessons and traits. Then you begin to hate them when their methods and ideologies conflict with what you perceive to be what everyone else is doing and thinking. But there's no such thing as an idyllic childhood. Your parents are just two people who banged and had a kid, mixing and matching the best parental guidance they can gather from books, common sense, and attempts at rectifying their own parent's mistakes. Your extended family is just as full of damaged personalities, hang-ups, annoying quirks, repeated jokes, addictions to drugs, alcohol, and being right all the time. All products of an imperfect environment. But when it comes time for celebrations and heartbreaks, who else are you going to turn to? The perfect family doesn't exist and despite what the media tells us, it's not normal to always get along with people you have frequent contact with. Human beings are hard-wired with a defense mechanism that literally prevents us from being happy. Our brain tells us “this isn't enough” and “what else?” in order to keep us moving and surviving. But what're you going to do? Blood is thicker than water, it's a family affair, you gotta be loyal to somebody! Everyone's got their shit to deal with and it's always something. There'll be fights in public, fun times in private, screaming and crying, laughter and bonding. But if you're lucky, they'll never give up on you.
Arrested Development was a show that thrived on the importance of family. Despite the broad self-interested yet lovable cartoonish characters, it's clear that these people would do anything for each other while engaging in jokes about greedy corporations, actors & magicians, and whacky socialite hijinx. Hell, incest between two cousins is one of the sources of comedy and you can't get any more familial than that. And like any family, it's impossible to choose a favorite member of the Bluth clan.
But we all know the story: the show was killed in it's prime. Despite aggressive fan campaigns, timely DVD releases, and winning an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series after it's freshman year, it was canceled after three increasingly-shorter seasons and fifty-three episodes. Can we blame the FOX network? Sure, the show could've benefited from a few more billboards, TV spots and a post-Superbowl airing. To their credit, it was premiered after The Simpsons in it's first season. We also have to remember that 2003 was a time before DVR was a household name and little-to-no online viewing capabilities existed (unlike now, where most networks post episodes the next morning on Hulu). This was a show that practically begged for multiple viewings to absorb every joke in both the fore and background. You couldn't watch this while doing laundry, unlike shows with this-is-the-punchline-music or a three-camera sitcom that says “See? It's funny because this warmed-up-by-a-comedian-audience-being-told-to-laugh is laughing! Why aren't you, America?” It was a show before it's time.
So let's take a look at the extended pilot, first made available on the DVD set, which mainly adds funny characters moments and doesn't bleep out the word “fuck”. The plot is surprisingly simple compared to future episodes: It's George Sr.'s retirement party, we meet all the members of the Bluth family, he passes over Michael, promotes his wife, and gets arrested. Instead of moving to Arizona, Michael decides that instead of just saying that family is important to his son, he needs to act as an example and stick around during his family's time of need. It's a quick half-hour, mainly due to the cinema verite style that employs hand-held cameras and cut-aways to flashbacks, stock footage, newspaper articles and clips. The faux-documentary style, where it's acknowledged that some film crew has been capturing moments of this family since it's beginnings, is a useful narrative device for half-hour comedies, if it's done well, mainly due to the way it handles exposition. In the UK and US versions of The Office and Modern Family, they take it a step backward with frequent talking-head interviews with our characters, who expose their inner thoughts before and after moments we're currently seeing. And it's what sets Arrested Development apart from those shows, there's too much energy and too much going on to stop and have Michael explain his feelings during the retirement party. A mark of a good show is one that trusts it's audience to pay attention. And the Bluths don't do interviews.
Overall, this is one of the better comedy pilots in recent history. The characters are all clearly defined before the first act break, there's real-world conflict that they react to in a comic way, and very solid jokes in the dialogue and visuals. Jason Bateman plays a great straight man, who is perhaps the funniest character on the show with his dead-pan observations on the ridiculous nature of his family. The world of Orange County and the Bluth company's history is immediately expanded upon, from the frozen banana stand to rival housing company Sitwell. The only complaints I have is that some of the jokes' reverse engineering is a bit more blatant the umpteenth time around, such as Maeby's name. Was she named that simply for her response to George Michael's question about them being cousins? But Mitch Hurwitz seems to have an affinity for name puns (see also: George Michael, G.O.B., Tobias Funke and his latest show Running Wilde). The show was reportedly developed as a response to all the corporate accounting scandals like Enron and Worldcom, and while one can only ride the “look how crazy rich people are?” boat for so long, the show deserves credit for expanding on that premise and transcending into comedy brilliance.
This is the first sitcom I've dissected, after diving into the television criticism arena with just my wit and ability to identify variations on a theme. I'll continue to blog about the first season of The Shield, tackle about three Arrested Development episodes a week (in one post), and then possibly move onto Oz. Thanks for reading!
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