Season 5

A raging dumpster fire, Arrested Development goes from bad to awful in Season 5. When Lucille Austero goes missing and is presumed dead Buster is arrested for her murder; meanwhile Lucille and George Bluth assume control of the Bluth Company and push Lindsay into running for congress and to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. And George Michael continues to fumble about with his Fakeblock app and his relationship with Rebel Alley, and Maeby scams her way into a retirement community. The writing is really bad. The repeating jokes and callbacks that were so clever in the first three seasons now just comes off as sad and pathetic. Also, they just won’t let go of terrible, unfunny plots like Fakeblock and whatever Tobias does. Additionally, the absence of Portia de Rossi in the second half of the season is glaring and drags it down. After what the series did satirizing the Iraq War in its original run, one would think that they would do something clever with the border wall, but instead it all falls flat. Arrested Development is nearly unrecognizable in its fifth season, having lost all of the wit and charm the made the series such a beloved cult hit.

I thought the ending was too dark. Buster turning out to be Lucille 2's killer was a huge turn off and was far from the original run's tone which was lighthearted. Anyways, I'd say S4 is the better season, the edited version Hurwitz did that made it 22 episodes is worth a watch and if it didn't have the cliffhanger that it did, I'd say it was great. This on the other hand never made me laugh and kind of dragged. There were also plenty of tropes that just weren't funny: the surfer guy/non-legit lawyer, Tobias's new family, and Maeby in a retirement home just didn't work for me.

I also think it was best to abandon plenty of the storylines from S4 such as FakeBlock and Rebel Alley (we get it, Ron Howard produces and narrates the series but it doesn't mean he has to appear all the time). I will say the first 8 episodes were superior, possibly because it felt slightly like a reboot but they took too long to resolve the Lucille 2 mystery.

Also, where's Portia de Rossi? If you can't get everyone back together under the same capacity, why bother continuing? What made S4 awkward was that these characters weren't always interacting with one another, but now we know one castmember isn't even acting any longer which really begs the case to end this show which brings me to the topic of revivals.

Not a fan of revivals that leave things up in the air, I think Mitchell Hurwitz is under the same delusion as Chris Carter, where a showrunner believes ending a series on a cliffhanger will get the studio and actors to immediately sign up for more. That's probably not going to happen when your show isn't the critically acclaimed gem it once was and when your cast feels it's time to move on. When a show that got cancelled or ended on the wrong note has the opportunity to come back it should wrap things up because as showbiz goes, you might not get another chance.