It’s The Last Time You’ll See These – Arrested Development Season 5, Part 2

It’s passed into cliché that you should be careful what you wish for – one of the best fictional renditions of this moral being ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, or its Stephen Kingified descendant ‘Pet Sematary’. In both of these, people lose their son, engage with dark forces to bring him back from the grave, and end up with a shambling horror. Would it be unkind to say something similar happened when Netflix brought Arrested Development back from the dead after seven years? Probably, but it wouldn’t be wrong.

So yes, you’d try to love this prodigal son – try and pretend it was just like the old days – then you’d pat it on the head and its hair would come off in your hand, and there’d be this musty smell you couldn’t quite place. In a way this was a fault of circumstance, since from the off, the post-revival season four was trying to explain away the time gap, while simultaneously battling with the busy schedules of its (by then) incredibly successful cast. While the first half of season five reunited the Bluths – their chemistry as an ensemble being the show’s obvious strength – the fault lines were still there to see, particularly as many cast members were clearly green-screening it in, acting opposite two tennis balls and a microphone, and with many of the shakier plotlines still there, hanging about like that musty smell.

And it’s against all this history that the second half has, just about, managed to pull it all together. Not to the level of the original run, but God, there’s moments where if you squint a bit you couldn’t tell. Again, the fault lines are still there if you care to look for them, particularly Ron Howard’s narrator – once so well timed, since the fourth season he’s served mainly to recap things that happened five minutes ago like the MC of a bad wildlife documentary – but, through the lofty expectations and the weight of accumulated plotlines, they’ve brought everything together into a satisfactory conclusion. Because, make no mistake, this is Arrested Development’s swansong.

Even discounting everything I’ve said so far – plus Alia Shawkat being firm about not coming back for a sixth season – the world’s moved past the show. The plotlines about social media white elephant ‘Fakeblock’ and a Mexican border wall seemed eerily prescient in 2013, but now feel dreadfully laboured (and I feel for the writers here – real life nicking your ideas is a distinctly bitter pill to swallow). Plus, in a wider sense, the Bluths were always meant to be an ersatz version of the Bush dynasty, and were perhaps uniquely well suited to evolve into parodies of the Trump family, since the Bushes may have been wealthy and psychotic but never quite as dilettantish as the Bluths – but everyone else had already chewed on that bone by the time Arrested Development returned.

(Similarly, The Simpsons – a show for the ‘90s if ever there was one – had some immaculate jabs at Bush the elder and Bill Clinton, only to drop the ball completely when Bush the younger rolled around.)

Indeed, the last few minutes of the double-length finale just about toe the line of being a confused, hyperactive mess, as it does its damnedest to tie up every single remaining plotline. At times it feels almost like a sop to the cast for turning up, especially Portia de Rossi, who’s by and large retired from acting and gets more screentime in the opening credits than anywhere else – everyone gets what they want, and it’s all happy. Or at least, not an absolute car crash. In most other contexts I’d call this kind of thing mushy claptrap, but if they’re going to end it – and that seems like the humane option – it’s only right that it be on a high note.

The main bum note of the second half is George and Lucille’s storyline – where all the others are interwoven like the good old days, theirs is at best tangential, and the arc of George trying to rekindle their dreadful relationship goes nowhere (as opposed to Oscar, the other corner of that love triangle, who literally runs off a couple episodes in). Watching the show systematically neuter George, one can’t help but feel that it has more than a little to do with the sexual misconduct accusations made against Jeffrey Tambor – as well as the much-publicised incident when he blew up at Jessica Walter onset, which, at the time, seemed to get folded into the other accusations. It’s always tricky to judge how much real life informs the plot of a work of fiction, but making George quite such a pathetic figure seems like a heavy-handed (not to mention misguided) mea culpa.

Indeed, it seems like there’s a cynical reading to be had from more and more aspects of the show – the Tambor affair exposed some distinct fault lines among the cast themselves in an inflammatory New York Times interview, which Michael Cera fairly wisely stayed away from. It’s also been suggested that this final season being split into two halves is less an artistic decision – the actual filming of it, after all, wrapped in 2017 – than it was an attempt to have two chances to be nominated for an award.

Given the circumstances, it’s hard to be too cruel about that – if they know they’re winding things down, why not try and get one last feather in your cap? Of course, this comes back to having an air of finality to it, going all out and splurging on a two-parter as one last hurrah. And honestly, I don’t mind, I’m content with this. Too many times, our instincts of ‘this is nice, let’s have more of this’ have led us down a bad route – just look at humanity’s relationship with opiates. Arrested Development couldn’t find a better time to call it a day than now, when they’re ending things on a high note, on their own terms, and with a healthy balance of goodwill from the fans – they won’t be clamouring for its return like they did in 2006, but neither will they be bemoaning how it completely went to shit.