TV: Arrested Development

[Simple Torture]

Yeah. I fucked Nazbakalijan.

[McParadigm]

Man, the second half of this season is a desert

[lennytheweedwhacker]

i still haven't watched the first half

[spike]

this shows has run its course. it gets on my nerves more than anything now.

[E.H. Ruddock]

Gah, I read a review saying the second half is bad. And now you guys. This is too bad because the first half had some moments. Oh well, time to end it.

[wease]

i still haven't watched the first half

Me neither.

[McParadigm]

I liked season 4. I liked the first half of season 5. This was a brutal slog. The cast is trying (although the women and David Cross do seem like they don’t want to be there), but there are entire scenes that don’t seem to have a single written joke in them. Bateman, Cera, and especially Hale and Arnett do a lot of performance work trying to save it.

But it’s just...trash. It’s just trash.

[scrub12]

I couldn’t stand season 4, and haven’t bothered with 5.

Especially after rewatching 1-3, I just internally made the decision to believe that’s when the show ended.

[VinylGuy]

never saw 5. Dont care for 6.

Sad.

[Biff Pocoroba]

I was looking forward to the new episodes but I have only seen negative reviews. I'll probably start them this weekend any way but AD has definitely had diminishing returns since it came to Netflix.

[E.H. Ruddock]

Seconds half of this season is way worse than the first. And anyone notice there seems to be an excessive amount of voiceover scenes? One of them was so obvious the actor wasn't saying what was being said

[Jorge]

Yes some weird dubbing going on

[JuanHamm]

That's always been an issue for AD.

[McParadigm]

It was worse than usual. I mentioned several cast members looking like they didn’t want to be there. It reminded me of this:

That trainwreck New York Times interview with the cast of Arrested Development painted a clear picture of what filming Season 5 must have been like, and David Cross has provided even more alarming details. The actor hit up Jim Norton and Sam Roberts, hosts of SiriusXM's Jim & Sam Show, to discuss the chaotic behind-the-scenes atmosphere during production on the new season.

Showrunner and series writer Mitch Hurwitz previously admitted he barely showed up on set and that the cast staged an intervention when his lack of availability and constant late delivery on scripts became a real issue. Cross expanded on that, saying, "It wasn't an easy shoot." According Indiewire, the actor went on to state: "It was not cool, for an actor, it was a difficult time, because ford myriad reasons I won't go into, we'd get a script, they weren't done. You'd get something at night, it'd be f--king pages and pages of stuff and then it would change later on that night. And then you'd get in in the morning, and you'd have two and a half new pages of long stuff."

That makes a lot of sense. I still cant fathom how that Guilty Guys stuff made it in. What an absolute chore.

[McParadigm]

Season 4 was good...just different. Season 5a is wobbly, but contains a handful of my favorite AD jokes. Finishing 5b literally made me question my self respect. Two episodes in I was telling myself “it’s not too late to be doing anything other than this.”

The only two moments I just genuinely enjoyed were also the only two times it did something different, rather than trying to keep to a formula its show runner no longer knows how to maintain. They were also both at the very, very end of the show:

Spoiler: show

The Bluths working together to pull off an illusion, and Buster being a murderer.

[stip]

ive got a few episodes left. it is only a shell of what it once was, but it elicited a few chuckles. i cant say ive wasted my time, but i dont know that ill be repeating it

part of the problem is that these major plots (the wall, fakeblock, mahybe’s old womsn thing,the fake family, etc.) have all just gone on way too long. AD works best with super fast pacing and the comedy of errors plotting that just stops working when stories run across entire seasons

[stip]

That dubing is remarkably bad

[stip]

Well that didn’t end the way I expected

[E.H. Ruddock]

I thought the ending was fine, but the overall production was awful. The dubbing thing was really, really distracting

[stip]

The last 3 seasons have gotten progressively worse but that’s really just the writing (and format). These guys are all so good in their roles I’d be fine with one more try