Character Development In Arrested Development

My latest, late foray into the world of television—hot on the heels of my crash course on methamphetamines in Breaking Bad in February—was the three seasons of Arrested Development, the 2003-2006 Fox comedy series based on the exploits of the wealthy and problematic Bluth family. Despite widespread critical acclaim, including several Emmy awards and one Golden Globe, the show never made an impact in the ratings and was cancelled after its third season in 2006. But that wasn’t the end for the show, which has received a surge of interest over the past few years, achieving such a cult following that plans for a fourth mini-season and a feature film are in the works for premiere/release dates in 2013.

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So what’s all the excitement about exactly? On the face of it, the premise of the show isn’t exactly promising: in the wake of corruption, treason, and embezzlement charges, George, Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), the patriarch of the Bluth family and the CEO of the Bluth Company, ends up in prison, leaving his son Michael (Jason Bateman) in charge of the company…and his deluded family. And, yes, this is very much a comedy—and a very funny one at that.

Other than Michael, his son George Michael (Michael Cera), and his cousin Maeby Fünke (Alia Shawkat), each member of the family is a trainwreck. The matriach Lucille (Jessica Walter) is a self-absorbed, sarcastic alcoholic; Michael’s twin sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) is a lazy narcissist; Lindsay’s husband Tobias (David Cross) is a moronic former psychiatrist with a shameless lack of social tact…you get the point—the description of Michael’s family is a litany of negative traits: greed, self-obsession, idiocy, laziness, and the general talent of being highly dislikable.

Despite the insistence of my girlfriend Kayla that I would come to accept these characters on their own terms (apologies, Kayla, I’m paraphrasing here…), I never came to accept some of them. In particular, the character of GOB (Will Arnett), the eldest son of the Bluth family, is so ruthlessly self-interested and unaware of those around him that, at moments, it moves out of comedy into cruel farce. There are episodes of such cruel weirdness that I had a hard time forgiving him easily.

I won’t get bogged down in details here, but recall even the simple scene in the third season episode “Fakin’ It,” in which GOB overturns Michael’s desk just in order to practice his witness testimony behind the mock ‘stand’ created by the desk. Meanwhile, Michael’s papers, pens, and desktop computer lie scattered on the floor. Sure, it’s comedy and GOB’s character is ridiculous, but I didn’t feel like I could reconcile even that weird slight—knocking over all the stuff on the desk to practice witness testimony with a hand puppet—with any kind of character save one suffering from very real mental illness. (Which, I admit, is possible in GOB's case.)

But my uneasiness about the characters isn’t limited to GOB—I have felt similarly about almost all the characters at one point or another throughout the series.

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Is that close-minded of me? It is comedy after all—nothing I’ve seen in the past months screams ‘over-the-top’ quite the way that Arrested Development does. Nothing in recent memory (besides maybe Conrad’s ridiculously drawn out ‘delayed decoding’ in Lord Jim—the Lit majors will have fun recognizing that one…) has had so much fun with conversations in which two people think they’re talking about the same thing only to discover later that they’ve had two entirely different interactions. The situations are rarely realistic; they always verge on farce. Think back to Michael’s on-and-off relationship with ‘blind’ attorney Maggie Lizer. The writers (and actors) come up with some extraordinarily funny and awkward misunderstandings. 

But, at the end of the day, these characters aren’t likable. My friend Andrew told me that whenever someone comments how The Office is the funniest show they’ve ever seen, he scoffs and tells them to go watch Arrested Development. (I’m loosely paraphrasing again… […not that Andrew reads this blog…].) If we’re talking funny, then I would argue that Andrew is accurate. Arrested Development has garnered more laughs from me in three seasons than The Office has in seven (or are they on the eighth season now?!).

But people don’t like The Office just because it’s funny. Of course, it is a comedy, but it also tends to push into drama thanks to the extended character development that it ventures into. I haven’t met an Office enthusiast who did not nearly shed some tears (or shed some like me) at Michael’s departure at the end of last season. We felt for him. That kind of feeling is crucial to the success of the show. (And it is equally crucial, I would argue, at its slow decline; Jim and Pam can’t hold up the show’s emotional arc all on their own.)

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Contrast your feelings for the characters on The Office with those in Arrested Development. Personally, I suppose that I have a demented ‘affection’ for most, if not all, of the characters on the show. But do I love any of them? I suppose I love George Michael’s bumbling adolescent awkwardness and Michael’s endless insistence on the importance of family. I suppose I love Tobias’s absurd enthusiasm for ‘theatre’ and GOB’s penchant for ill-timed magic tricks. But I don’t love any of the characters. For the most part, they are too self-interested for me to be deeply interested in them; they look inwards and inwards and inwards again.

Why did we love Michael on The Office so much? I think we loved him because he was exactly their opposite: outwards, outwards, and outwards. He was always looking to people outside himself, concealing his loneliness and self-embarrassment on the inside. That’s by no means a recipe for a lovable character, but it’s sure more lovable than Lucille’s greedy corruption, which, when you peel back the several face-lifts, doesn’t seem to have much heart behind it.