Arrested development narrator intro series#

In the new season, he manages to limit his anxiety and completely ignore his own failure, truly becoming a tech guy. The newly skeevy, adult George Michael hides behind his adopted identity as a scamming tech entrepreneur, dangling the promise of opting out of the panopticon of social media in front of an eager public. It’s not just the comparisons to the president, though. Each time she makes a characteristic Bluth faux pas, it only improves her standing in the polls. By now, daughter Lindsay Bluth has fully embracing her family history and become an “authentic” political hero running for Congress by pandering to angry racists. As Lucille learns early in the fifth season watching then-candidate Trump speak (apparently this season is set in 2015, though season four premiered in 2013), George should have just waited. tries to get a lucrative government contract to build a wall with Mexico.

But Arrested Development has taken on newfound significance: In the fourth season, George Sr. Given the mixed reception of season four, reanimating the show’s corpse seems like a huge mistake, even as a large chunk of the entertainment industry is now devoted to dragging out the shelf life of successful properties in a way that almost inevitably makes the original product feel stale. The remixed version of the season is, like the original, an interesting, if not entirely successful experiment - Arrested Development’s fourth season infamously separated the ensemble because of the actors’ busy schedules and attempted to run a dozen or so different plots in parallel as a result, creating an uncanny sense of artificiality. It was also, more pointedly, marketing for the fifth season.

Recently, Netflix released a “remixed” and re-edited new version of Arrested Development’s fourth season, an experiment in what an artist could do with the permanent instability of streaming like the once-incessant tweaks to Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. But those same conditions are what primed the world for the return of Arrested Development on Netflix, in a fourth season that premiered in 2013 and a fifth set for later this month - a turn that has seen the show, for better and worse, eat itself. This is another way of saying that Arrested Development is about the conditions that made the unending exhaustion of American political life possible, and to rewatch those early seasons is another way of seeing how we got here. They were constantly in the news for no real reason other than being a bunch of rich idiots, mirroring the period when people starting making reality shows about subjects who were “famous for being famous.” Eventually, the Bluths’ “reasonable” son Michael discovers that his father, George Bluth Sr., had been indulging in “light treason” by building houses for Saddam Hussein, allowing a running thread about the futility of the Iraq War at a time when critics of America’s foreign policy were frequently expunged from public life. The Bluth family was in the business of making flimsy McMansions as part of the growing bubble.

Arrested development narrator intro series#

Why has this 15-year-old series become a common political reference point? Arrested Development, which premiered in 2003, was finely honed Bush-era satire. That process has taken several forms, ranging from edited versions of the Arrested Development intro using the Trump family to the meme that deploys the show’s narration as a way of creating ironic contrasts to seemingly endless Twitter debates about which member of the Bluth family maps onto which Trump. In the last couple of years, the show about a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together has come back into fashion as a way for many people to interpret the current political moment. There are seemingly endless comparisons between the Trumps and the Bluths, the family at the center of Arrested Development - the rampant grift and incompetence, the casual racism, the abandoned sons, the strong incestual subtext bordering on explicit text.