The cast, despite the seven year gap and some rustiness in the early episodes, do a great job of bringing the Bluths back. Jeffrey Tambor and Jessica Walter push themselves when they could easily have rested on the shells of George Sr. and Lucille. Tambor does the best work he has done on the show with Oscar and George Sr.’s gradual transformation, particularly when Oscar has to interact with his brother’s family. Walter balances Lucille’s ruthlessness and abusive tendencies with the awareness that made that abuse so effective and an uncanny ability to react to Arrested Development‘s absurd world in surprising ways. She sings a showstopper in Tobias’ well-intentioned, constantly lawsuit threatened and completely terrible Fantastic Four musical. She dodges a would-be-assassin’s sharpened noodle knife. She tolerates the shrine Buster built to her after her arrest (it involves enough martinis to give Connery’s James Bond pause). And she sells all of it.
Tambor and Walter are the stand outs, particularly since Tambor is tied so heavily to the disappointing wall plot, but the rest of the cast take to the parts with aplomb. Alia Shawkat, who gets less screen time than some of the family, brings self-loathing to Maeby’s previously extant blend of ambition, creativity and longing for attention that makes “Senoritis”, her lone episode, one of the season’s best for both comedy and pathos. Michael Cera subtly corrupts George Michael; he remains, in the words of the narrator “a good kid”, but succumbs to the Bluth family knack for/addiction to lying and concealing his identity to break away from his Dad. This is both funny (Wait for the mustache. And the lonely housewife in Spain.) and dramatically satisfying. It’s Cera who closes out the season, and if George Michael punching his overprotective, increasingly selfish dad in the face is Arrested Development‘s last image, then it is a worthy one that lives up to both the series’ comic and dramatic sides.
Arrested Development season four is a resurrection, to get back to the religious imagery for a conclusion in the best sense of the word. It is another shot fired for television-style storytelling in a world where the idea of how television programming is consumed is changing dramatically. It is faithful to what came before without simply regurgitating catch phrases and images, and its new material is frequently worthy. One joke in particular, culminating in a boy who swallows a mouse, stands as one of the series all-time best examples of layered, multilevel humor. The pacing, dated political subjects and that blasted wall subplot do some real damage, but overall, Arrested Development‘s fourth season is a welcome return to one of fiction’s most fascinatingly, hilariously dysfunctional families.
