Saturday, 11 August 2018

Arrested Development


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!

Kitty Sanchez

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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