"Now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything
and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together."
With the help of Ron Howard as both executive producer and narrator, Mitch Hurwitz, co-creator of The Ellen Show, was able to turn Arrested Development into one of the most consistently funny and refreshingly well written sitcoms to grace American television sets. It centers around widowed father Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) as he struggles to hold his abysmally dysfunctional socialite family and their once wealthy business together, after their father and CEO George Bluth (Jeffrey Tambor) is sent to prison.
Shot like a hand-held documentary series, with frequent flashbacks and archival photographs, the series keeps a frantic, yet pleasing pace, while depending on the wonderfully assembled ensemble cast to glue it all together. It's rare that such a large cast works so well together but this group hasn't a weak link in the bunch. Every single interaction and combination of characters makes for hilarious and interesting moments while constantly driving the plot forward. Like Seinfeld, each episode begins with multiple unrelated plots that all seem to cleverly meet up in the end, usually resulting in complete disaster.
Unlike most sitcoms, Arrested Development is told in a serialized episodic format, so it's best you watch it from the first episode, which seemed to frustrate several viewers who wanted their shows to be forgotten minutes after it was over. AD never panders to those unable to think outside the idiot box and instead asks for your close attention and memory to understand several of it's "blink and you'll miss them" jokes. As a fancy way to wrap things up in a short epilogue format, it tags on a "false" preview of the next episode, which did nothing but infuriate dullards who just didn't seem to understand what it really was and needed their humor spoon fed to them.
Normally it takes a half a season or full year for a series to find it's groove but Arrested Development knew exactly what it was doing from the first episode and makes it all the more stronger in the long run. Sadly, the series struggled to find a proper audience and became that "I heard it's good but never seen it" series, which is quite frankly infuriating when Chuck Lorre sitcoms are shat out like hotcakes for years on end.
22 episodes. 22 minutes each.
Buyer's Guide:
Available in DVD box sets and on iTunes, Netflix and Amazon.
5 Families With Low Self Esteem out of 5
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