It’s hard watching one of your favorite TV shows grow old. While it’s pretty neat that services like Netflix are willing to resurrect 10-year old properties (and even more miraculous that the original cast and crew are still willing to be a part of it), I think I would have preferred for Arrested Development to rest in peace after three perfect seasons. 2013’s Season 4 was definitely messy. It was a fun experiment and had its moments of greatness, but it clearly struggled to get the cast all in one room and tried too hard to tell a cohesive story. Five years later, Season 5 struggles again to pick up where Season 4 left off, weighed down by some of the plot points the prior season unfortunately set up for it.
Season 5 works best when it’s not trying to be a sequel. Once we get into newer storylines—like Maeby pretending to be a senior citizen or Michael finding out about the family’s beach cottage—glimpses of the original Arrested Development start to shine through. This is also helped by the fact that the cast interacts with each other more. This isn’t a hodgepodge of character-specific vignettes anymore. Scheduling conflicts are obviously still at play, though, since some characters seem to rarely run into each other, and Lindsay is altogether banished to green-screen hell. Honestly, if Portia de Rossi can’t be there in-person, they should just write her out. It was really distracting how fake her presence was.
At the end of the day, Season 5 is a lot better than Season 4 but isn’t nearly as good as the original run. The cast just feels worn out, and the writing isn’t as snappy. Young Arrested Development excelled at setting up jokes in early episodes that paid dividends later on or slowly escalating recurring one-liners until they became old hat. Season 5’s running joke about Michael not knowing about the beach cottage was funny but was the only joke that felt truly “Arrested.” Other times, it seemed like the show was setting something up but would then deliver the punchline during the same scene. In the era of streaming, it feels weird for a once progressive TV show to dumb down its long-game cleverness.
Reviewer
- I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.
- 14 November, 2024gamesHell Pie Review
- 23 September, 2024moviesBeetlejuice Beetlejuice Review
- 9 September, 2024gamesPatch Quest Review
- 5 September, 2024gamesMoving Out 2 Review