‘Arrested Development’ Season 4 review: A chore to watch and a delight to decrypt

‘Arrested Development’ Season 4 review: A chore to watch and a delight to decrypt

You have watched every episode of the first three seasons of “Arrested Development.” (Sam Urdank/Netflix) - Jessica Walter and Jeffrey Tambor in “Arrested Development.” GoingOut Guide Looking for things to do? Select one or more criteria to search Kid-friendly Free admission Get ideas You have swallowed Netflix’s bonus fourth season without chewing. You have tried to wash it down with honey from the hive mind. You have begun to gag. The new season started streaming early Sunday morning. The professional recappers picked it apart almost instantly, littering the Internet with twitticisms. Superfans got exactly what we wanted but still felt bereft — a psychological symptom of 21st-century existence, as well as a fitting response to the sitcom that best satirizes this now-teenaged era. The first two seasons of “Arrested Development,” which aired on Fox from 2003 to 2005, ennoble the medium of television. The 22-minute episodes are tart, fizzy escapades following a family of entitled Californians whose real estate wealth evaporates after the patriarch (genius Jeffrey Tambor) is jailed for defrauding investors. The show, with its tic-laden characters and top-shelf storytelling, was a bonfire of inanities. It exulted in its inside jokes. It embraced verbal artistry and narrative footnoting. It drew energy from the awful gravity that binds even the most combative families. Above all, it trusted the intelligence and vigilance of its handful of viewers; we, in turn, took possession of this overlooked masterpiece in order to feel superior to the rest of America, which was making “Two and a Half Men” a No. 1 show. “Arrested Development” was five years ahead of its time. Its meme-ability predated the rise of the meme. Its parodies of 1 percenters and malfeasant corporations were 1,000 news cycles ahead of the subprime mortgage crisis and the Olympic debut of Rafalca. The metastatic third and final network season, which wrapped in early 2006, thumbed its nose at the mundane forces that brought about its demise: modest viewership, fleeing advertisers and fickle TV executives. Each would soon be immaterial to a series’ distribution and survival. Thus we have arrived, seven years later, at the Internet resurrection of a beloved television series whose cult has since expanded into a major religion. And we are faced with two questions — one as old as consciousness, the other as new as Netflix Instant. Do great expectations sabotage greatness? No, but they can distort it. Can a binge on fudge-rich, instant-order entertainment truly nourish us? Yes, but only with a proper digestif. Here’s one, on the rocks: The new 15-episode season of “Arrested Development” is staggering in its ambition, surgical in its execution and diabolical in its conclusion. It’s a chore to watch and a delight to decrypt. Its overwhelmingness contributes to its initial underwhelmingness. But in time, with a moment to reflect, it begins to feel like the fullest and fraughtest expression of its form. It is, in a perverse way, the “Ulysses” of sitcoms. First, its ambition. Even as it undermines its own pretension with pratfalls and vulgarities, Season 4 is a brazen attempt to map the thorny overlap between human isolation and human interdependence. The prideful ego of family good guy Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman at his wits’ end), the slothful id of his older brother Gob (Will Arnett at his oiliest), the bizarre compulsions of family members around them — every character flaw is exaggerated into malfunction for the sake of conflict.



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