Author: Tim Goodman / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
After a couple of stutter-steps salvaging the storyline from season four, the show begins to hit its stride, evoking its glory days.
In addition to being one of the great comedies of all time, Arrested Development will surely go down in history as being one of the most unfortunate, which in some weird way is perfectly on point for the material.
If you’ll remember, and you probably won’t, the last four episodes of the third season on Fox were burned off in one night — unceremoniously, right up against the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. It’s funny now.A season before that, back in the days when ratings really mattered, Fox had to be talked into saving the show, but by the end of that third season it was mostly a cult series, and all the hipster kids who said they were there at the beginning had not yet started watching.
From cult to legend, Arrested Development was then revived in 2013 by a new thing called Netflix, which needed its own street cred before, you know, taking over the world. People might not remember wanting that fourth season so badly that they would buy a subscription service to get it. What they remember clearly is how disappointed they were by the cut-up results, the Rashomon-style Rasho-mess that creator and writer Mitch Hurwitz ended up constructing, partly out of necessity. (For one thing, it was a challenge to coordinate the shooting schedules of the castmembers, which by then were pretty famous. For another, Netflix was a mysterious new thing and Hurwitz was told people could watch all the episodes at once and even out of order, any which way, any time they wanted — ah, the nascent days of streaming! All these factors contributed to his bold, labor-intensive and, yes, “huge mistake.”)
I call the show “unfortunate” because although season four is a confusing structural mess and a be-careful-what-you-wish-for moment, it’s also very, very funny in parts. Those parts are better highlighted in the more linear recut of the season that Hurwitz posted on Netflix earlier this month — on Cinco de Mayo, of course.
The new version serves as a better appetizer for the vastly improved fifth season. (Netflix is dropping eight of the 16…The post ‘Arrested Development’ Season 5: TV Review appeared first on FeedBox.