Aressted Development

Arrested Development Season 1-3: staring Jason Batman, David Cross, Jeffery Tambor, Portia de Ross, Michael Cera, Will Arnett, Ali Shawkat, Tony Hale, Jessica Walter.

I haven’t seen this show since it came out, but I figured I might as well give it another run through before the next season comes out on Netflix.  I’m also going to look at this show based on it being a show and put aside all politics and religious beliefs and judge the show on its merits as a show, nothing more.  

First off, this is one of the best ensemble casts ever, for any show I’ve seen and one of the best comedies ever to be on TV.  Every one of the people cast for the Bluth family is perfect and they embody those people with a precision to detail that borders on Daniel Day-Lewis obsessiveness.  It didn’t seem like I was watching a TV show.  It really had the documentary feel they were going for.  This show was doing the fake documentary thing way before The Office started using it and it melded into the show with incredible ease.  Another thing, this show did well that helped to make it as funny and as good as it is, was that it didn’t shoot in front of a live audience.  This means the jokes fly fast and furious, so you’ve got pay attention, because they don’t leave room for a live audience to laugh.  They just keep going with the story line and go from joke to joke to joke without a moment to pause for breath.  How they managed to do all of this with a straight face is well beyond me?  

They storylines are really tight and well-paced.  Things will happen in one episode that don’t make a lot of sense but then a few episodes later they explain what had happened previously and everything makes sense.  They did not treat the audience as if they were stupid, but intelligent enough to pay attention.  This is also one of the few comedies that valued continuity, as they continued to set themselves up later on in earlier episodes.  I just don’t find enough writers that committed to detail, most seem more concerned with other things than actual story and characters.  That is the exact opposite for this show, story detail and characters are at the fore front of everything.  This is one of few shows I’ve seen where I laughed out loud a lot when I was watching it.  This is also a show that revels in the absurd and the more absurd the better.  This is truly a show based on the Theater of the Absurd and one of the few shows I’ve watched that have gotten away with it.  The writers never forget their commitment with the absurd.

Their use of guest actors as characters is the best I’ve seen, hands down.  No other show even compares with how they used guest actors.  And even the in jokes they would use with said guest actors just boggled my mind because the in jokes were so funny and subtle when you figured them out.  They used Scott Baio to replace Henry Winkler, when Scott Baio replaced Henry Winkler’s Fonze on Happy Days.  They use Justine Bateman to possibly be Jason Bateman’s sister and then have them in some incredibly uneasy moments that are truly funny.  Also I didn’t realize how much I missed Justine Bateman until I saw her on this show.  She did such a good job with such a short part.  Even Julia Lewis-Dryfuss has one of her most memorable roles since Seinfeld as a blind/pregnant lawyer.  Those are just to name a few.  

Now if there’s one thing I didn’t like about this show, it was how they used easy targets for comedy: right wing politics and Christianity, to name the most frequent of targets.  Especially for a show as smart as this to frequent these targets was just lazy.  I mean why not target the Muslims or Islamic religion especially since George Bluth had a direct relationship with them and there is a lot of comedic gold to be dug up there.  I’m not a huge fan of South Park, but that’s been one thing Stone and Parker have been very able to do over the years and that’s target everyone for comedy, because in the long run comedy knows no boundaries and everyone is up for grabs.