Arrested Development: Best Sitcom Ever

At a loss for what to write for the devoted followers of the Lagniappe this week, I was distressed. Pondering what would make interesting reading fodder, I briefly considered "Mark Redmond's Lessons on Defensive Driving" (Tip #42: Should you find yourself in a mild fender bender, do not bother having the dents removed, as scars upon your vehicle's surface will convince other drivers to yield to you, as it seems you are a man or woman with nothing let to lose.), but was advised against it by wiser elements of the staff, as doing so could result in litigation I can ill afford. For this reason, I am revisiting the concept of a review of the television program Arrested Development, as previously I imagined it would be a mere three words long: "Best Sitcom Ever." It has come to my attention that this opinion is not shared by everyone. Here's why they are wrong.

Arrested Development's strengths lie in its rewarding of long time viewers. Conceived (and narrated) by actor/director Ron Howard (Hey, Opie!), the show is a comedy tour de force, as a wildly affluent family is forced to learn to live small when the patriarch, George Bluth, played by comedy legend Jeffrey Tambor, a real estate development mogul who clawed his way up from his first small business, a frozen banana confection stand, is arrested for "light treason." His wife, Lucille, played by Jessica Walter, a stunningly dryly comedic genius, is left to live in the family's penthouse alone, save for her over mothered youngest son, Buster (Tony Hale), who, in season two, will be forced into military service when a Michael Moore look-alike from the Jimmy Kimmel evening program taunts Lucille into signing him up. (Buster is nearly immediately given leave from his duties, when, in an act of defiance, he goes swimming in the ocean to spite his mother, only to have his hand bitten off by a "loose seal."

The loose seal in question has a taste for mammal blood after a mid-illusion accident caused by the eldest Bluth child, Gob (pronounced "Joe-b"; played by Will Arnett), a professional magician and founder of the magician's alliance, who lives off of Bluth Company kickbacks. He is ejected from his own creation, however, in the pilot episode, as his attempts to save his father from the Trade Commission and finally earn George Sr.'s love by hiding him in the "Aztec tomb" result in a TV news crew revealing the trick's secret to the world at large: "Mr. Bluth's son tried to conceal his father in the Aztec tomb... a nice trick for a human, but the dogs found him almost instantly."

The core of the show, however, revolves around Michael, the middle son of the Bluth family, who, with his son George Michael, lives in the attic of the Bluth Company's "Sudden Valley" development model home, one of the family's last holdings. As the president of the Bluth Company in the wake of his father's indictment, he is forced to find a way to keep the company's earnings up and get George Sr. out of prison, while fending off the rest of the family's money hungry appetites. The most formidable of these is the last Bluth sibling, Michael's twin sister Lindsay (the stunningly beautiful Portia de Rossi, Ellen Degeneres's companion), who comes to reside in the model home with her husband, Dr. Tobias Funke, a psychiatrist who, upon losing his medical license after breaking the sternum of a napping man he believed to be having a heart attack, decides to pursue acting after finding himself on the wrong boat during George Sr.'s retirement party. Played with aplomb by David Cross of HBO's acclaimed Mr. Show with Bob and David, Tobias, along with Gob, provides the majority of the show's occasional slapstick humor. Alia Shawkat rounds out the main cast as Maeby ("Maybe") Funke, the neglected daughter of two very vapid people.

The show's failure to succeed commercially lay mainly in two areas: as a rule, Fox advertised the show rarely, if ever (out of 3 seasons worth of DVDs encompassing 53 episodes on 6 discs, the special features include only one TV promo over the course of 3 years), and, unlike shows made for the middling sort, like According to Jim and King of Queens, Arrested Development is built for regular viewing. The jokes work on many levels, but not least of all because they built as the show went on. In the aforementioned seal maiming event, Buster is treated poorly and at arm's length, as, when the Bluths were children, George Sr. had a one-armed man on payroll who would arrive on the scene to teach lessons to the kids whenever George called, from reminding them to leave a note on the fridge when they drank the last of the milk, to not yelling on the yacht. Seinfeld snobs (and God knows that they are everywhere) find this, combined with some mild smart slapstick, to be the greatest faults of the show, but, like classical music, AD at times requires active relaxation to fully appreciate the humor, which abounds more here than anywhere else.

That said, AD is not for everyone. It is a sitcom in name only; the plebian masses may find themselves bereft without a laugh track and, discomfited by not knowing when the writers want them to laugh, may return to watching the gratuitous banalities of The War at Home. The show is not shot in the traditional 3 camera design of a three walled traditional sitcom, and, with wry narration by Ron Howard, it has a mockumentary style not unlike This is Spinal Tap, but if any would fault this, let them suckle at the teat of Everybody Loves Raymond for all I care. With guests including Judy Greer, as George Sr.'s secretary, Inside the Actor's Studio host James Lipton as the warden of the jail, Henry Winkler, Harry Hamlin, Scott Baio, a four episode run featuring Charlize Theron, Justine Bateman, Carl Weathers, Liza Minelli as Buster's sometime girlfriend, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Ed Begley Jr. as George's business rival, many, many turns by many talented actors and comedians, and the one pity role that Ron always throws to his poor orthodontically challenged brother Clint, you will not be disappointed, except when you reach the series's all too premature end. We can take heart, however, that at least this work of comedy genius, from the first season's word play, to the second season's occasional buffoonery, to season three's no holds barred romping, never had the chance to go sour (Hello, Simpsons. You know that Dandy Warhols' song? "We used to be friends?" Yeah).

Until next time, it's like my Uncle Bill always says: "You can outrun one cop, but you can't outrun their radio."