Right, say this name: Bob Loblaw.
Ok, now say it again, but in an American accent: Bob Loblaw.
Now say it a few times at speed in the same accent. Congratulations, you’re just sitting there
saying “blah blah blah” over and over.
But, isn’t that clever?
I certainly thought it was back at university when we were flicking
through the TV channels in a friend’s room.
It must have been around 2006, back in the days when digital TV was
still new and people were excited to have a handful of extra channels on
offer. The word digibox was seen as
futuristic and progressive, whereas it was obscure and redundant within years. In those days, this was at odds with the
actual age of my friend’s room, which dated back to the fourteenth
century. My final-year room was just
next door, both in a part of our college called the Buttery, though its
relation to any sort of dairy produce seemed to have vanished with the evenness
of its floors and ceilings many years prior.
Her open-door policy gave the rest of us free reign to use her illegal
microwave (which college authorities demanded be moved to a kitchen and we
happily ignored for the whole year) and to park ourselves on the cheap old sofa
for a bit of telly. Coming from a
household that revolved around TV screens, university had seen me go cold turkey
on television. Mostly.
I’ve already mentioned the time we gathered for the
last-ever episode of Friends, and then there were
of course the kindred spirits I found to watch Big Brother with (which I haven’t
actually covered yet so let’s just hyperlink Celebrity
Big Brother again). By final year,
though, I felt more adult and sophisticated and better able to handle my time,
surviving with greater ease an average week of two thousand words of essay and
four translations every which way between English and French and English and
German. Despite the need to be studying
at all times, we found the odd moment after dinner in hall to sit through
thirty minutes of Hollyoaks,
despite being unable to identify with any character that wasn’t studying at all
times. Then, one evening, scrolling the
channels, we stumbled across an episode of Arrested Development
on BBC2.
The cameras were shaky. The characters were numerous. The dialogue was almost faster than we could
think. The jokes poured in one after the
other, playing on words, playing on visuals, playing on anything. And, in the midst of it, this odd family were
discussing a lawyer called Bob Loblaw, mentioning the name so speedily that
everything simply descended into blah blah blah. I was deeply impressed. This felt like clever stuff. Finally, a sitcom for smart people!
Years later, I managed to make my way through the first
three series, potentially renting the DVDs off Lovefilm. I don’t need to recap the story for anyone,
as the opening credits explain everything, but nothing else will make sense if
I don’t, so, I actually do. It’s all
about the Bluth family: a wealthy bunch of Californians up to no good in the
property market. The development that is
being arrested, I assume, is that of their son Michael, as he is the only sensible
hard-working one, so they all rely on him while carrying on with terrible
behaviour. He just wants to get his son,
George Michael (I know), away from their clutches, and this is thwarted
repeatedly. You’ve got Ron Howard narrating, as
there’s a lot to keep up with, and each episode is beautifully structured
around a climactic misunderstanding or assumption whose complexity makes you
raise your eyebrows at the final reveal.
On the way, you’ll chuckle at the plays on words as the characters’
foibles develop. I began to assume that
the writers literally thought of something ridiculous and then worked back from
it to contrive its occurrence. It’s all
about setting up: reams of dialogue go into letting one character say something
that is at once outrageous, yet perfectly, plausibly innocent in regard to the plot,
such as the famous Tobias line: “I blue/blew myself.”
Earning a cult status, the show naturally got the shit
cancelled out of it. About a decade
later, Netflix resuscitated it. All the actors were too busy and important to
make time for filming, so a fourth series was teased out in a way that didn’t require
them all to be together. Then everybody
said that was silly and the scenes were remixed into a better version, which is
the one that I watched. While the first
three series roll along joyfully, I found this fourth a poor echo. It’s probably me, at capacity for whimsical
homonym abuse, or maybe the main characters, worn from over usage (apart from
Buster, who has a million miles left), just had nowhere interesting left to go. But finishing that season, and the fifth, has
recently been a right old chore, just so I could write this post safe in the
knowledge I had consumed the full body of work in order to type snarky shots
about it. I would begin each episode
determined to pay attention and keep up.
But, without fail, I would find myself desperately scrolling anything on
my phone rather than following the action on the TV. The tone just felt constantly the same. It’s entirely my loss, but it also indicates
something wasn’t right with the show.
In fact, it was the peripheral characters that provided the
most entertainment, so let’s run through some top picks:
Lucille 2
Liza
Minnelli with vertigo. It’s been
great to have the chance to look at her face and hear her voice, because she’s
such a bundle of enthusiastic energy. Her
attempts to seduce any of the Bluth boys have rendered me scared of apartment
building corridors.
Steve Holt
Steve Holt!
A secretary who aggressively lifts up her own shirt as a
form of attack. Deeply disturbing.
Ann Veal
George Michael’s girlfriend who is so boring that everyone
forgets her all the time.
Tony Wonder
Ben
Stiller as a crap magician (still better than Gob, though I maintain that all magicians are crap), always on hand in a
puff of smoke asking if someone said wonder, which nobody did.
So yeah, I’m being kind of meh about one of the cleverest and
most critically acclaimed pieces of TV out there, on a tiny blog that only my
Facebook pals can find. I don’t think I
mean to be. Try this show out. Come for the quotable one-liners. Look great at dinner parties. Freak yourself out that Michael Cera at once doesn’t
age and does age, and you’ll be terribly distracted trying to work out
which. But that’s the point – don’t
watch this show with any distractions.
It needs your full attention, because it’s smarter than you and it’s
smarter than me. Miss a moment and the
rest of the plot falls apart as if a tiny screw is loose. And then, it just feels like you’re watching
a load of blah blah blah…
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