5x02 Self-Deportation

[7.1/10] Two episodes in, and season 5 of Arrested Development is definitely funnier than season 4, but remains a little disjointed. There’s no real stories in this episode, just a collection of sketches that don’t have much to do with one another. Some of them are funny. Some of them fall flat. But nothing here feels terribly cohesive.

I’ll be frank. I don’t know why Mitch Hurwitz and company didn’t just stick with what brought them to the dance. I can understand the desire to innovate and tailor your show to a binge-format if that’s how you expect people to consume it. But part of the brilliance of the show’s original run is that it was modular. Any individual story within an episode was funny on its own, but worked even better if you put it together with the others. Any individual episode was great on its own terms, but you had added humor from running gags and the bigger picture coming into focus over the course of a given arc or a season or even the show as a whole.

In short, the elements of the show built on one another, from the randomest individual gag to the course of the entire series. That’s been lost since the show went off the air. Instead, we get more and more scenes that feel stapled together. Some of them are funny scenes! They just leave me missing what the show used to do so well.

Oddly rough, this episode gives us a bunch of two-person pairings. Michael and Buster is a long, talk-y scene, but Tony Hale continues to be hilarious, so it largely works. Micheal trying to throw Buster to the wolves with the cops isn’t great from a character who seems worse and worse as a person. But he’s still an amusing straight man to Buster’s usual repressed antics, and Buster’s weird, nigh-psychotic interlude about the family making fun of Michaell for always leaving and returning was a major highlight.

The bit with GOB and Goerge sr. pretending to be casanovas while both are uninterested in women for reasons they’re too embarrassed to admit is just the same joke over and over again, to diminishing returns. But Will Arnett in particular is so funny, to the point that his barely-hidden crush on Tony Wonder and struggle to confront having human feelings again is amusing despite that.

Michael and Beby going down to Mexico together has its moments. I particularly appreciate the running gag of them not recognizing Steve Holt and good ol’ sTeve seeming pretty oblivious about it. The family’s confusion over the word primo/prima feels like a successor to the season 1 “hermano” gags. Maeby ending up helping immigrants because she understands what it’s like to be unwanted by both your “parents” is a clever direction. And the funniest thing in this whole episode are the stretches where George Michael explores “Mexico” with some college kids, little realizing it’s a sanitized, Americanized part of the country tailored for tourists like him. It’s cutting and funny at the same time.

That just leaves Lucille and Tobias, a pairing that’s rife for comedy (rife!), but plays out less funny than it should be. The gags about Lucille’s cruelty are a little more on the nose, albeit still worth a chuckle. And Arrested Development taking a victory lap for doing the “build a wall” shtick before the chimp with a machine gun made it such a cause celebre is amusing enough, especially with Lucille having a mutual admiration society with another bastion of evil.

Overall, I appreciated many of the individual pieces of this one, but they don’t really fit together in a way that explains why they should be kept together, and I miss the clockwork brilliance of the show’s original recipe.