The Bluths are back in town

The fourth season of Arrested Development aired on Netflix last night, and after a bit of difficulty (being as Netflix is a streaming website only Americans can access) I finally got my hands on a copy of the first episode.

I had watched some interviews with the cast already and had heard that they were doing an interesting setup for each episode – essentially each character will be the focus of each of the fifteen episodes. Some scenes will be repeated as the audience views the same scene from another point of view.

After watching the first episode, I have to say that I do hope when I see this particular episode from other points of view that it looks better.

In this episode, we follow our original main character – Michael Bluth. As an avid AD fan, I have been dreaming of this day for years. But this was not what I was expecting.  The episode dragged on, and missed that spark the first three seasons had.

Michael had always been the centre (and strongest point) of what seemed to be TV’s most dysfunctional family. Watching him disintegrate into loserdom, I feel as if Arrested Development have lost touch with the crux of their cult glory.

Michael was always there to pick up the pieces when his family was so eager to tear everything down in their regular, subtlety hilarious ways. However in the first episode, it is pretty much painful to watch his son – the unfortunately named George Michael – try to ask his own father to move out of living in his college dorm for the whole episode.

In both storyline and in reality, the Bluths are back – and are in the worst shape ever.

One interview in particular (which can be viewed here) was with David Cross and Portia De Rossi. They told us in this interview that the episodes were longer.  I feel that they were trying to warn us.

Previously it was 20 minutes of packed in wit with a dash of dry humour. Instead, the first episode was a dragged-out 32 minutes worth of bland, depressing storyline.

Arrested Development has previously been punchy, clever, witty and full of inside jokes that run throughout the whole program – this was vaguely touched on by rerunning scenes from old episodes as flashbacks.

However, I have heard on the grapevine that you shouldn’t watch one and give up. That they aren’t supposed to be standalone episodes. The more you watch, the more a puzzle forms in front of your eyes. By golly, I hope so. I think the idea behind how the season has been designed, with interlocking story lines effectively looking at the same scenes from different points of view is sheer brilliance. I hope creator and writer Mitchell Hurwitz can pull this off.