Arrested Development

I suspect it might be a classic that deserves a spot in the pantheon of great, long-delayed follow-ups, though I need to watch the whole thing again and live with it and then write about it again to be sure. That I’d want to rewatch the whole season immediately is, of course, another, possibly higher compliment.

The Rashomon-style storytelling takes a bit to get used to, and the sometimes feverish flow of the jokes (which fans may remember from the hall-of-fame first three seasons) struggle to unleash themselves in the first couple of episodes, but then it snowballs into seven-and-a-half hours of hilarity just waiting for a movie to follow it up.

The show’s writing, pacing, flashback scenes and unexpected surprises fit like a comfortable shoe.

Overall impression: look for them [the episodes] to get better, stronger and funnier.

The new season is actually pretty good, and it gets better with each episode.

It’s a chore to watch and a delight to decrypt. Its overwhelmingness contributes to its initial underwhelmingness. But in time, with a moment to reflect, it begins to feel like the fullest and fraughtest expression of its form. It is, in a perverse way, the “Ulysses” of sitcoms.

Arrested Development often feels like an interwoven series of droll sketch comedies, which means viewers can walk in at almost any time and enjoy the gags.

The show improves as it gathers context, and before long you stop thinking about what makes this Arrested Development different from all other Arrested Developments.

The cultural references feel a bit dated (the bubble-bursting housing-market collapse, Herman Cain proxy Herbert Love, The Blind Side, and The Social Network among them), and there's too much miscalculated racial humor and preoccupation with sex offender-related jokes, but there's still a plethora of fresh homonym-friendly wordplay, surprising parallels, and witty allusions to delight and preoccupy us until the series pulls off its next magic trick.

Arrested remains a bracingly clever but emotionally cold intellectual exercise of a comedy, one that revels in puns, double entendres, intricately structured set pieces, astonishingly inappropriate jokes, asides, callbacks, flashbacks and, less propitiously, its own inaccessibility.

The 15 episodes of Arrested Development themselves, which start badly, but accumulate to something pretty good.

Overall, the season stands up well next to any sitcom on the air now; a few episodes were meandering slogs, but a few others are among the funniest, best-executed sitcom episodes I’ve seen this season.

It gets off to a slow start and then takes a while for the whole enterprise to get up to speed. At about the third episode, enough of a foundation has been set that the jokes start to come more easily and more quickly.

Despite some incredibly funny set pieces--almost all of them involving two or more of the original characters interacting in ways we instantly understand (like Buster helping Lucille deal with the conditions of her house arrest). The new season doesn't really work as its own thing, but as a prologue for this movie that no one in the industry has shown the slightest inclination towards making.

This new, fourth season isn't bad but it's a very different beast from the original, and it's not nearly as funny.

[There are] moments of pure brilliance--and moments that had me doubled over in mirth.... Unfortunately, there are stretches in this new batch of episodes that feel more flabby than snappy, and there are some lulls that leave you downright fatigued.

The new Arrested Development is uneven--but Arrested Development always was, even at its peak. Binge-watching, though, makes it seem even more uneven, and that's too bad.

Arrested Development’s long-awaited encore is like a lot of TV development--namely, an interesting idea that was more exciting on paper.

Whereas the first three seasons were subtle, there is a decided lack of finesse here. Season 4 feels like an anvil being dropped on the heads of the viewers, one with a note attached that reads, “LOVE ME. PLEASE LOVE ME. LOVE ME,” all in caps.