Arrested Development

So, two and a half (but wrapped-up) seasons of a criticly acclaimed sit-com with a strong fanbase – that sounds promising right?

Indeed it did. So I ventured on, out, forwards, and boldly watched what apparently not enough people had boldly watched before.

Arrested Development is not a show that takes itself seriously. The characters of it, however, do. It seems to me that the best way of describing what this show is about is to map out the main characters, a tight-knit family known as the Bluths, for you:

First, there's Michael Bluth. He's the show's straight-man, the sensible one, and, his ever-present achilles-heel; the responsible and caring one. Which everybody else on the show is only all to handily aware of.

Then there's his dad, George Senior. Now George is the head of the Bluth Company, quite intelligent but rather eccentric, and with a somewhat easy-going view of the law. The show, tellingly, starts with him being arrested at his retirement-party.

Michael's mother, the elitist and uniformly despised matriarch of the family, is the elitist and uniformly despised matriarch of the family. The sole exception to this rule is her youngest son, Michael's little brother

Buster. He's well past thirty, but still lives at home with a (disturbingly) close relationship to his mother, whom he depends on completely.

Gob, their older brother, is the family screw-up, insisting on trying to build a career as a magician. He's a womanizer, he's lazy, and he's goofily stupid. He's also constantly trying to prove he's not stupid, nor a screw-up, by doing anything his father asks him.

Someone who's not that stupid is Michael's twin-sister Lindsey – however that's probably all there is to say about her good sides. As lazy as Gob, and probably even more detached from the real world than he is. She, however, does not try to get her dad's approval – to the contrary. Hence her marrying

Tobias Fünke, Michael's brother-in-law. A former psychiatrist and constant bowl of boiling yet pathetic ideas for his next big project, this man is the epitome of horrid husband-material in every sense of the word except his extraordinary willingness to do good and make things work. Think about it. It's way worse than it sounds.

With such parents, it's no wonder that Maebe Fünke, Lindsey and Tobias' daughter, constantly tries to get attention. Which, no matter how hard she tries, she never manages to get. The one person who does notice her, though, is

George Michael, Michael's son. Who really shouldn't, as they're cousins. George Michael is a school-smart, silent and modest boy who idolizes his father and trusts him blindly – it's almost sweet, actually.

That's the Bluths. As the show title indicates, it chronicles the events subsequent to George Sr.'s arrest. Michael, who wishes nothing more than to leave his family behind him forever, is forced to take charge of the family company and hold his cluster of leeches together without letting them suck what's left of the company dry.

Sounds bleak? It's really quite hilarious. The show's main strength is the ability to reference old episodes without the usual price-tag of long reiterations and repeated set-ups – you get to enjoy the fruits of jokes set-up dozens of episodes back without the new episode needing to waste time on re-telling them. Which is quite interestingly well pulled off. Obviously, this is something you don't really notice 'til well into the second season, but I promise, it's worth it. Besides that, the series has a pretty interesting combination of the utterly crazy and the very obvious and mundane that works really well. There's also a virtual score of funny recurring characters that help the show stay fresh.

Mostly, though, I love the narrator. 'Cause there's a narrator. And he, more than any one character, MAKES this show what it is. Highly recommended. Of pure comedy shows, I think I can only name Blackadder as a sure trump for this one. Scrubs is competitive, but has (unsurprisingly with all its seasons) not quite managed to stay steadily on a level akin to this. And, in all fairness, nostalgia might also make me bump Friends up on its level. Still, that's a pretty high league in my book.