by Cory Barker
With an ensemble of nine actors, all committed to other film and television projects, it quickly became a challenge to bring the full cast back together for an eight-month shooting schedule. According to Hurwitz, this limitation inspired the fourth season’s anthological format, with the promotion of all members of the Bluth family to lead character within the context of individual episodes.37Although nominal lead Michael remains prominent in the plot—he is the only character to appear in all 15 season four episodes—his attempts to keep the dysfunctional Bluth family together are gone, shifting him into an emotionally codependent father and absentee, resentful brother and son. He has become, in many respects, a man anxious to stay far away from his family. Without Michael’s centering presence, the Bluths follow relatively independent paths over the following years (as revealed in their respective episodes throughout season four).
Indeed, the opening credits clearly emphasize the newly shared focus of the series among all lead characters. The original title sequence referred to Michael as “the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together,” before introducing the series: “it’s Arrested Development.” Meanwhile, the new credits directly highlight the character who stars at the center of the episode. For instance, Lindsay’s (Portia de Rossi) episodes are introduced as “Now the story of a family whose future was abruptly cancelled, and the one daughter who had no choice but to keep herself together. It’s Lindsay’s Arrested Development.”
The following chart shows how the main characters are distributed throughout season four episodes (all 2013). Michael, George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), Lindsay, Tobias (David Cross), Gob (Will Arnett), and George Michael (Michael Cera) take leading roles in two episodes each along the season, while Lucille (Jessica Walter), Maeby, and Buster (Tony Hale) only star in their own episodes once each.
In addition to the opening credits, the series’ title track plays minor musical signatures with specific instruments for each character. A guitar, for example, plays George Sr.’s musical signature, while Tobias’s instruments is a saxophone.
The idea of an anthology series was Hurwitz and his team’s solution to developing interesting stories for all characters, despite the cast’s limitations with an extended shooting schedule. Season four episodes adopt a character’s individual perspective for the duration of six of the seven years that Arrested Development was cancelled, in a game of temporal back-and-forth in which the complexity is enhanced by Netflix’s content distribution model. Talking about the challenge of putting together such an elaborate, fragmented storytelling format, Hurwitz notes,
I would say that in its purest form, a new medium requires a new format. You can’t do in a short story what you could do for a novel, in a novel. You can’t do in a haiku what you would do in a long-form poem. In a perfect world, we would be making something that could be only on Netflix, just like in years prior, you could make something that could only be on HBO.38
Hurwitz claims that the company’s incentive for creativity was essential in finding the tone and style that shaped season four’s episodes and structure. Netflix’s prioritizing of the experimental characteristics of a sitcom like Arrested Development made Hurwitz’s vision for a fragmented and decentralized season possible. As he notes,
Netflix is a very interesting company. These guys are really experimental, fresh thinkers…. I’ve never had a working relationship like I have with them. I developed a lot of the design of this show with them. That conversation was about, “What are your needs? What are you looking for? Will this work for you guys? Will a show work where you’ve got one episode per character?” They really were a creative partner. They wanted the next progression of Arrested Development and helped me find it, as opposed to telling me how to do it.39
Hurwitz also admits Netflix’s content distribution system, with the full season’s simultaneous release, influenced his storytelling approach to season four: “it’s not the same kind of storytelling I think I would have told had the episodes been released through another distributor.”40
Minding the actors schedule and the season’s anthological structure, Netflix’s episodes only had all nine actors together for two days of shooting, which correspond to the only two scenes were the cast is completely reassembled in the same place. The scenes are: (1) after the third season finale, when Lucille is arrested, and both the Bluths and their victims aboard the Queen Mary are taken to the Harbormaster’s Lodge; and (2) at the gathering at the Balboa Towers penthouse, during George Michael’s college farewell party before Lucille’s trial.
The cast’s limited shared screen time is enhanced by the dispersion of scene fragments across multiple episodes throughout the season, punctuated by editing and framing techniques that highlight some characters while obscuring or concealing others. An example with Tobias happens in the scene at the Coast Guard’s Harbormaster’s Lodge. In “Borderline Personalities,” George Sr. and Lucille talk about the matriarch’s alibi for sailing off with the ship. In the background, we can see Tobias and Lindsay talking, and Tobias twirls while apparently singing. In the next episode, “Indian Takers,” we witness the scene from Lindsay’s perspective and find out that Tobias was, in fact, singing: “Oh, is that a gal I see / No, it’s just a fallacy,” with a pun with the expression “phallus, see.” The scene reappears in the Tobias-centric episode, “A New Start,” where his singing can be heard in the background of another scene—this one featuring a depressed Gob—from “Colony Collapse.” Finally, we see the gag once again through Maeby and George Michael’s perspective in “Señoritis,” as Maeby tries to get attention from her parents by pretending to be dead.
Such an approach, in which necessary information and scene fragments are severed and subsequently placed into multiple episodes, is the foundation of our analysis of the season’s circular narrative structure. In the episodes produced for Netflix, the series’ diegetic time structure sets aside the primarily chronological way in which the events are portrayed, as it did in the first three seasons, to embrace a centripetal narrative dynamic, a kind of timelessness where the narrative’s chronology lapses back and forth at key moments over the episodes. Take for example both the start and end point of the chronological narrative of the fourth season. The story starts immediately after the original series finale, set in 2006, when Lucille tries to escape the police charges against her by fleeting aboard the Queen Mary, and follows each of the characters until the “Cinco de Cuatro” celebration in May 2012, covering a period of six of the seven years between the series’ cancellation and reboot. However, the events unfolding in both those scenes are dispersed over 13 of the 15 episodes that make up the series’ fourth season, and both the starting and the ending point of the chronological narrative are presented in the season premiere, “Flight of the Phoenix.”
The Cinco de Cuatro’s celebration is the first scene of Arrested Development’s season four, displaying an inebriated Michael about to offer sexual favors to Lucille Austero (Liza Minnelli) in order to pay a $700 million loan he cannot afford. However, the story’s chronological starting point—Lucille Bluth’s arrest on the Queen Mary—is only mentioned halfway through the episode, in a flashback covering “The Great Dark Period” in which the series was not aired. The encounters between the main characters at the Coast Guard’s Harbormaster’s Lodge are portrayed in seven other episodes of the season, always offering new information about the plot, while the Mexican celebration’s fateful night, in which the stories of all members of the Bluth family culminate, is shown in eight other episodes. The following chart illustrates the distribution of each of the scenes’ fragments throughout the season’s 15 episodes. The first column, “Scenes,” indicates where the dramatic situation takes place, while the remaining columns refer to the each of the season’s episodes. Gray indications represent how many times each of the scenes appeared throughout the season.
The returning movements to events already portrayed in previous episodes are a specific trait of Arrested Development�
�s fourth season temporal structure and indicate a kind of time experience simultaneity for the series’ circular diegetic chronology. Writing of Michael’s opening scene in “Flight of the Phoenix,” Jaime Nicolás points out:
This first scene will be, for the audience, a beginning, a past, compared with the rest of the character’s story, it will be a future for Michael’s character—since this is the end of his narrative arc—and, finally, it will be a simultaneous present to the other characters that we will see encountering each other at the same celebration in their respective episodes.41
The fourth season’s chronology enabled Hurwitz to experiment with a puzzle-like design of the narrative. For example, in the scene at the Balboa Towers penthouse, three months after the Queen Mary is capsized, Michael talks to his parents, George Sr. and Lucille, and their lawyer, Barry Zuckerkorn (Henry Winkler), about the upcoming trial of the family’s matriarch (“Flight of the Phoenix”). What initially appears to be a conversation among Michael, George Sr. and Lucille (with a quick appearance from Buster) is later revealed to also include Gob (“Borderline Personalities”), Lindsay and Tobias (“Indian Takers”), Gob’s fiancée, Ann Veal (Mae Whitman) (“Colony Collapse”), Maeby (“Señoritis”), and, finally, George Michael (“It Gets Better”)—as it turns out, the gathering is actually George Michael’s send-off party for college.
This example illustrates another way in which season four of Arrested Development differentiates itself from the first three seasons: the shifting balance between individual episodic arcs, focused on each of the nine main characters, and a larger multiperspectivist serial narration. Such construction gradually explores the viewpoints and influence of each character to the overall narrative, adding new layers of meaning (and jokes) with every new episode, while clarifying the role of each character to the development of the story. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz emphasizes the importance of Netflix’s distribution model while talking about Arrested Development’s fourth season.
Season four plays like a collection of parallel yet interwoven short stories that, when watched in succession, keep revealing new bits of comic business…. When critics write that the streaming model of scripted TV offers new creative opportunities for writers, it’s this kind of storytelling that they’re talking about: a comic epic made of intricately crafted mosaic tiles that reveal a big picture as you binge-watch.42
The night of events at the Century Plaza Hotel, for example, illustrates episodic developments for each of the characters present, while, at the same time, contributing to the season’s serial arc. At the time in question, George Sr. attends the rally of politician Herbert Love (Terry Crews) to ask for support to build a wall between the United States and Mexico—thus ensuring that the land he purchased at the border is still valuable (“Double Crossers”). George Sr.’s older son, Gob, on the other hand, is waiting for the baby-faced pop star Mark Cherry (Daniel Amerman) at the Opie Awards, a ceremony that honors young talents from the film and television industries, when he finds out his nemesis, Tony Wonder (Ben Stiller), is doing a magic act at Schnoodle’s launch party (“Colony Collapse”). While trying to sabotage Tony’s act, Gob accidentally ends up locking Lindsay’s boyfriend, Marky Bark (Chris Diamantopoulos), inside the podium where Herbert was going to make his rally’s speech, effectively ruining the couple’s peaceful protest. The magician’s sister, in turn, takes interest in Love and leaves her boyfriend to become the politician’s mistress (“Red Hairing”).
Maeby and George Michael are also there, since Maeby is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Opie Award for her work as a producer at Tantamount Studios. Disappointed to find out that the Lifetime Achievement Opie is only awarded to people whose careers have died, Maeby announces, in her speech, that she is launching an Internet company called Fakeblock, an alleged privacy software George Michael claims to be developing. Maeby, however, does not want their family ties to become public, which in turn leads George Michael to present himself to actress Rebel Alley (Isla Fisher) as George Maharis (“Señoritis”), whose reputation of a Mark Zuckerberg–type of unpretentious internet entrepreneur quickly gains fame (“It Gets Better”).
Amidst the character’s individual developments, significant pieces from the season’s serial arc are also defined: George Sr. influences Herbert to position himself in favor of building the wall between the United States and Mexico, an important point for the Bluths’ financial situation over the fourth season. The politician, on the other hand, gets closer to George Sr.’s daughter, and the couple’s affair eventually leads to Lindsay’s political rise after a rebellion of sorts on the evening of Cinco de Cuatro. This, in turn, results in a Hillary Clinton–like Lindsay running for U.S. Congress in Love’s place; finally, Meaby and George Michael’s appearance at the Opies is also a key plot point, one that revolves around George Michael’s company, Fakeblock, and the George Maharis identity, who ends up becoming Rebel’s boyfriend; in fact, the actress is dating another man, George Michael’s father, Michael, in what is one of the fourth season’s main conflicts.
The fundamental changes in Arrested Development’s narrative structure and Netflix’s content distribution model encourage specific consumption practices and cognitive demands to fully appreciate the episodes. The act of re-watching is reinforced in order of a more complete understanding of the storylines, since such process requires a high ability to recall and reorganize the previous episodes’ events.
Addressing the type of comic construction explored in Arrested Development’s fourth season episodes, Jaime Costa Nicolás talks about an “ergodic gag,” making reference to Espen Aarseth’s electronic literature studies, to describe a kind of narrative in which the reader needs to perform a physical effort to build the text’s meaning—ergodic comes from the Greek words ergon (work) and hodos (path).43 Nicolás uses the term ergodic gag to reference
situations / planes that separately mean nothing but together they create a comic situation and, therefore, they require a conscious editing process different from that offered by fiction. These grafts which originate comedy are gone and it will be our task to find them in another scene from these 15 episodes. The viewer, therefore, must go through a learning process of all the situations that make up the season to be able to connect both dots. The punch happens between the screen’s image and the viewer’s imagination.44
Once again, there is a highlight to the viewing possibilities offered by Netflix’s distribution model: at the streaming platform, subscribers can watch all episodes back to back, pause, rewind, leave an episode and look for a piece of information in another segment, revisit past episodes or scenes, explore future episodes’ excerpts, and so on, in a temporality suspension and simultaneity exercise similar to the narrative structure developed by Hurwitz and the series’ writing staff.
Conclusion
In “The B Team,” in a kindness gesture to help his son Michael, love-struck by an actress he just met and knows nothing about, George Sr. offers to sign the release form for the movie based on the Bluth family. What appears to be a surprisingly loving moment between father and son turns out to be an intricate favor exchange between the two characters, slowly revealed each time we revisit the scene on the following episodes—“Double Crossers,” “Red Hairing,” and “Queen B.”
What Arrested Development’s narrator refers to as “the four-favor family pact” is actually an elaborate gag sustained by the circular narrative structure of the series’ fourth season, which reframes the meaning of diegetic past events to contextualize situations shown in the narrative chronological future—a kind of continuous present permanently built in the characters’ simultaneous trajectory. Such narrative structure is possible because the agents involved in series development creatively explored the possibilities offered by both Netflix’s strategic management and its technological platform. Netflix’s executives were aware of its need to associate with the artistic ambitions of a showrunner in order to position itself in a new competitive scenario amongst
American production and distribution companies.
In this essay, Bourdieu’s theoretical repertoire allowed us to comprehend the relationship between the specific narrative structure of Arrested Development’s fourth season episodes and Netflix’s interest in changing its position within the television industry. This perspective sheds light on the social agents’ decisions importance in both scenarios, because theirs is the ability to comprehend and evaluate the specific historical dynamics in the field of television series production.
It is also important to highlight the skills, wits, and insights of social agents such as Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, David Nevins, Ted Sarandos, and Mitch Hurwitz, in their ability to understand the opportunities and conditions, both creative and marketwise, available at the time in the field of television production. These agents’ actions and strategies, when striving for dominant positions within the field, are important to analyze in order to comprehend the logical principles that rule this particular social space of dispute and partnership, competitiveness and collaboration, where the power to define and legitimize what constitutes quality and distinction is constantly negotiated amongst the social agents and institutions. The decisions undertaken by these experienced creators and producers, associated with Netflix’s bold business perspective in this market, are essential in understanding not only Arrested Development’s poetic and aesthetic innovations, but also the promising current moment within the competitive dynamics of the field of television series production.