About.com Rating

The Bottom Line

The fourth season of Arrested Development is a failed experiment, with convoluted storytelling that fails to pay off either narratively or comedically.

Details

• Stars Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Portia de Rossi, Tony Hale, David Cross, Jeffrey Tambor, Alia Shawkat, Jessica Walter
• Created by Mitchell Hurwitz
• Premiered May 26, 2013, on Netflix

Review

Devoted fans of Arrested Development waited seven years for the show to return following its cancellation following its third season on Fox in 2006, but the resurrection in 2013 via Netflix turns out to be a disappointment in many ways.

Thanks to budgetary and scheduling restrictions, producers were unable to get the entire cast together at the same time, so each episode of the 15-episode fourth season focuses on one of the nine main characters, with other characters appearing in background roles. Creator Mitchell Hurwitz and the show’s other writers have tried to use that to their advantage, constructing a story that constantly doubles back on itself, revealing more details and different perspectives in each episode.

The story follows the members of the loathsome Bluth family as they deal with the aftermath of both the events of third-season finale (when toxic matriarch Lucille, played by Jessica Walter, hijacked the Queen Mary and was indicted for embezzlement) and Lucille’s eventual incarceration on charges stemming from those events. Left mostly to their own devices, the Bluths are even more reprehensible than ever, and while that’s often what made them funny in the past, here their behavior is so unpleasant and mean-spirited that it’s hard to care about what happens to them next.

Looking for what happens “next” in the story is sort of a deceptive goal anyway, since each episode explores essentially the same period of time, ending roughly in the same place. As the season progresses, the story gets more and more convoluted, but what should be rewarding and revealing is only tedious and headache-inducing. The complexity of the show’s humor was a big strength in the first three seasons, but here the pieces of each joke are spaced so far apart that sometimes it’s hard to tell if a joke is even being made.

With all this complexity, the show also feels paradoxically rushed; the narration from Ron Howard is even more ubiquitous, so much so that certain episodes just feel like extended “Next time on …” montages. The obvious special effects (sometimes used to place actors together in scenes they weren’t able to actually shoot at the same time) look cheap, and there’s plenty of awkward post-production dialogue dubbing. When the story is this intricate, the pieces need to fit together seamlessly, but that’s not the case here.

Those fans who’ve spent the last seven years watching and rewatching the first three seasons may be more forgiving of the new episodes, and for people who love to scrutinize every minute detail of the show, there are still plenty of little gems to be discovered. For me, I always found Arrested Development more clever than funny, and I rarely laughed at jokes in the early seasons, even if I appreciated the effort that went in to creating them. This new season is all effort and no laughter, however, and when piecing together what happens practically requires a flowchart, the balance has been shifted in the wrong direction. By the time the final episode ends, instead of bringing all the disparate elements together in a satisfying and creative fashion, Hurwitz and company leave questions unanswered and plot threads hanging. There may be a fifth season or even the long-promised movie to wrap them up, but nothing in the fourth season left me eager to see that happen.