4x01 Flight of the Phoenix

[6.1/10] There’s some laughs to be had in “Flight of the Phoenix.” I got a kick out of all the bad omens at “Sunny Valley.” GOB stroking his brother’s hair after roofieing him and saying “so easy to forget” is darkly funny. And Barry’s usual incompetence matched with Michael’s usual pretending to be a maritime lawyer thanks to his school play is a larf.

But damnit, this just doesn’t feel like Arrested Development. Maybe it’s the fact that the cast is split up into chunks by necessity. Everyone got big after the show’s original run. That’s a good thing, but it meant the format and structure had to differ markedly from what had come before. That’s...less of a good thing.

There’s very little here that’s recognizable as the same show beyond the cast, a couple familiar sets and, of course, the stair car. Mitch Hurwitz tried to stretch the clockwork plotting to a season-wide basis rather than an episode-by-episode basis, meaning none of the gags really snap into place here like they did during the original run. There isn’t much of the great inter-family dynamic among the Bluths that powers the show with fantastic comic chemistry.

It’s...awkward. So much of Michael’s focus episode here is cringe comedy of the sort Arrested Development rarely trafficked in. He inserts himself in his son’s life when he’s not wanted. He tries to kiss Lucille 2. He has embarrassing conversations with the guys at the airport check-in counter. Gone is the snappy dialogue and cross-cutting humor, and in its place are long, awkward scenes of uncomfortable personal interactions.

Arrested Development was never going to seamlessly pick up where it left off seven years prior, but the return engagement is a rocky one. The attempts to reintroduce everyone, kickoff a storyline in the present, and connect the dots to the pasts leave the episode feeling ungainly. The tale of how Michael was ready to leave his family behind only to come back to help again doesn’t track well with the season 3 finale.

Even the little stuff feels off. Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen as young Lucille and George Sr. is a case of miscasting. The rhythms of scenes and sequences never hits the right beats. About the only thing that does still work as good as the old days is Ron Howard’s narration, which still fits the bill and does an admirable job trying to make sense of a scattered, awkward first episode back.

I want to applaud Mitch Hurwitz’s ambition. In an era where the season was becoming the essential unit of television rather than the episode, he went to the binge-heavy streaming service and delivered a comedy built to be consumed as a fifteen-part opus rather than a series of individual, albeit interconnected installments. That’s the sort of bold comic stroke that made the original run so hilarious and inventive.

But even on a rewatch, taking the show one half hour at a time isn’t very fun or very funny. We’ll just have to hope that more of season 4’s setups and payoff, and more importantly its comedy, will click into place as the season goes on.