Man, I know that the original cut of Season 4 of Arrested Development wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but this remix is a borderline disaster.
The weakness of the original cut was twofold. For one, it kept certain characters sidelined for way too long; the lone Buster episode takes place all the way at the end of the season, for instance, and George's plot is more or less wrapped up by the end of the sixth episode. And giving each of the nine family members more or less their own isolated adventures made for some very inconsistent episodes. For another thing, the season jumped just all over the place chronologically, making it hard for some fans to even understand which parts of each episode were happening when.
Folks, I'm sad to report - the remixed season doesn't really solve either one of those problems all the way, and what's worse, it introduces a whole slew of new problems. The pacing is an absolute mess now, with little chunks of all the original episodes taped together into 22-minute installments that don't really follow any sort of structure. The season still doesn't really flow chronologically, at all, and still jumps around temporally. But now instead of being focused on individual character arcs, there's almost no rhyme or reason to what happens when, which incidents get put where, and why.
In the original cut, for instance, Gob's arc plays out across two episodes that send him off on a downward spiral and then just sort of revel in him being there, hanging out with an Entourage-style entourage after running away from a marriage to his nephew's ex-girlfriend. There's a frenetic pace of introducing new characters, like Mark Cherry and his crew, and just rolling with it. But split Gob's tale up across 22 episodes and it's easy to lose track of why he's doing what he's doing. Like, one episode he's hanging out with his estranged son, and then two episodes later he's just a young celebrity's driver and unwanted tag-along, and there's no connective tissue between the two!
Or how about this? Maybe my favorite reveal in the original fourth season cut was the way the show built up college senior George Michael as a tech maven of sorts, a Mark Zuckerberg savant building his own anti-piracy software called FakeBlock. But then it's finally revealed in the George Michael episode at the end of the season that George Michael isn't some kind of tech savant at all - he's just building a woodblock simulation app... called FakeBlock. It's one of the funniest rug-pulls in the series' entire history, and it just doesn't land at all when you know what FakeBlock actually is before it begins to get all hyped up.
Similarly, Isla Fisher's character, Rebel, gets introduced pretty early on in the original cut of the season. So when she shows up scattered across the rest of the season, it's a callback, a reference. Now, she makes her first appearance in a Gob subplot at a bar, and before we even know who she is, there's a cutaway to a PSA she's filmed. Without knowing who this character is, it's just a random woman at a bar who gets an extended gag of sorts before we know her well enough to find the extended gag funny in the first place.
It's a mess! It's a goddamn mess. I admire what Mitch Hurwitz tried to do the first time around - it was bold, innovative, and different, just like Arrested Development itself was back when it first hit the airwaves. But I kind of wish he'd just left the season alone, syndication opportunities be damned! This remix just ends up even messier and more disorienting than the original cut. Oh well! Either way, I'm still very much looking forward to what he's got in store for the fifth season - a season which presumably returns to the familiar "every character in every episode" flow and format to begin with.
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