Friday, September 01, 2006
DVD Review: Arrested Development - Season 3
Arrested Development is, without a doubt, the best TV show to come along since a little new classic called Futurama. It was intelligent, creative, witty, well-cast, well-written and packed with so many in-jokes, references and callbacks that you could watch each episode four or five times before you caught every hilarious joke. And even after you found them all, the episode would still be uproariously side-splitting, possibly moreseo. It was almost universally critically acclaimed, and merely being a fan of the show was enough to possibly qualify a person for membership in Mensa.
Naturally, it was cancelled after two-and-a-half seasons.
Fortunately, in our modern times we have television shows available at our fingertips, thanks to the magic of DVD. Now, those fuckers at Fox have released the final half of the Bluth family’s misadventures, for all fans of quality entertainment to enjoy.
“It was Arrested Development.”
Season 3 started out somewhat contentiously with fans of the show. Aside from the season-opener “The Cabin Show,” which introduces a family vehicle even more outlandish than the stair-car (“You’re going to get live-ins.”), the first half of the season is devoted to Michael Bluth’s (Jason Bateman) pursuit of free-spirited English woman Rita (played by the stunning Charlize Theron) who may or may not be a spy working to bring down the Bluth company for the mysterious Mr. F (“Mr. F!”). The full story arc lasts five whole episodes, which is easily the longest back-to-back plotline in the show’s tenure. Fans were upset that time was being taken away from characters like Gob (Will Arnett) and Tobias (David Cross) for a sort of half-baked James Bond parody that didn’t seem to be building to anything.
Of course, we were all dead wrong. It’d be a crime to reveal the identity of Mr. F (“Mr. F!”) as one cannot watch the first half of the season but in only one way when one knows how it ends. The reveal of Mr. F (“Mr. F!”) is as an audacious and risky plot twist as any in the history of television, yet it’s done so well that comes across as neither cruel nor contrived for the sake of shock, and is very much in the spirit of the show. The arc is unfortunately somewhat bereft of the family interplay that is the backbone of the show, but taken as a whole, it’s probably the best subplot of the series.
After the Rita arc, the show gets back into the main story and we’re treated to some of the best episodes of the series. “S.O.B.s” may be my favorite episode of the whole series (which is currently “Afternoon Delight”), largely for it’s hilarious meta-references. By this time, it was only too apparent that the show was not long for network television, so the episode utilizes a variety of “gimmicks” poking fun at other cheap ratings ploys. Included are 3-D sequences (Gob throws a tomato at the camera for no apparent reason), celebrity cameos (Andy Richter playing five different characters) and a “live” ending. The episode is a simultaneously hilarious and tragic reminder of why so much TV is monstrously crappy and why this show was so good. “Exit Strategy” and “Family Ties” are both up there with the best of the series – really the only weak one of the whole set is “Prison Break-In,” but this is completely relative, of course. “Break-In” is still funnier than every episode of many, many TV shows.
The finale episode “Development Arrested” is as good as a send-off for the series as I could hope for. Not satisfied to just wrap up all the loose ends, the series creators actually throw in some new revelations, including one about the parentage of one of the Bluth children that is wild even for this series. It’s obviously truncated – many of these plot points and resolutions feel crammed in, and it was likely that several of them would have been the main story arc for the second half of the season had those rat bastards at Fox not cut down the show order from 22 to 13. The end is satisfying, but frustrating because there is so much more that we want to know about these people that we probably never will.
Honestly, if Futurama didn’t get to live up to its potential, Arrested Development barely got to show it’s off. In another, happier alternate dimension free of war and Brett Ratner, Arrested Development continued for 6 seasons before the writers and staff agreed that the show had run its course and it would be better to quit before the show got stale like The Simpsons which went on to 35 seasons (in all universes, The Simpsons runs overlong).
It was Arrested Development. And it was glorious.
Special Features
For this 2-discer of a season, we get treated to three commentaries – on “Forget-Me-Now,” “The Ocean Walker” and “Development Arrested.” It’d be nice to have more, but since these commentaries have every cast member on them except for Jeffrey Tambor – whose absence becomes a running joke on the 3 commentaries – I’d imagine it was hard to get them together for more than a few, especially since the show was over by that point. I’d rather have all of the cast members on a few than a smattering of members on all episodes because they’re all too funny as a group to split up. Try telling that to Fox.
We also get a fairly profane blooper reel and a documentary about the last day of location shooting, with a choked-up goodbye from Will Arnett (“Taste my sad, Michael!”) The extras don’t set a new standard for TV show DVD packages, but face it, they could sell this show with no extras and it’d still be worth purchasing.
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Great review.
I sort of like that my dvd shelf is a virtual graveyard of cancelled gems. Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Firefly (shut it), and Arrested Development. It's a lot easier on the wallet...and it says "Yes, I spend of great deal of time on the internets but at least I don't have all 78 seasons of Friends and a house full of cats."
I've got a few long-running series (X-Files 1-6, South Park, Buffy) but the discs I rewatch the most are the short-run shows like this, The Ben Stiller Show, Mr. Show, etc.