Arrested Development Season 4 Remix is Totally Worth It

There’s a lot you can binge this holiday weekend whether that be in the theater for Deadpool 2 (worth it) or Solo (worth it because of Donald Glover), you could rank up your light levels in Destiny 2 as we suggested last week, but for us, we caught up with our favorite dysfunctional family which, despite offscreen PR disasters and questionable proximity to the wrong side of the #MeToo movement, still holds a close place to our heart.

Like most of you, we were all left in mystified dismay n May 2013, when we tried to watch the universally despised season 4. It left such a bad taste in our mouths forcing us to question whether or not the show was originally as good as we thought, so we were a bit stunned to see Netflix announce season 5 is on the horizon.

To catch up, we decided to take the plunge this weekend and rewatch season 4 which creator Mitch Hurwitz carefully retconned on Netflix replacing the original with a remixed version dubbed Fateful Consequences. It’s a bizarre move as Netflix as all but scrubbed the original from existence. But considering how regrettable season 4 was when it arrived five years ago, we actually understand the move.

What’s stunning is that with three careful changes, Arrested Development Season 4 is actually almost as good as the original series now. That’s right, what was once close to unwatchable is now pretty great. Here’s how Mitch Hurwitz saved season 4.

Even without Michael as the moral center, season 4 remix is still an enjoyable experience

Episode length matters

Among some of the notable changes in season 4 to accommodate the schedules of the cast was to focus entire episodes on a single character. This meant you usually followed someone over the course of most of the timeline of season 4 before resetting again the next episode to follow somebody else. It was creative, it was brave, and it was a mistake. On byproduct of this storytelling structure was that to tell a complete character arc took significant chunks of time, up to nearly 40 minutes for some episodes. This felt unnatural for a show known for punchy, fast paced sense of humor. Episodes were long-winded and just exhausting. The remix drops this in favor of the much more palatable, TV-ready 22-minute episodes so it never outstays its welcome. Bizarrely you’re more likely inclined to just let it roll into the next episode a few times in a single sitting vs. previously being barely able to make it through one prolonged episode.

David Cross continues to get the best lines of the show

Call-backs are more frequent

Arrested Development nailed the art of the call-back, making repeat viewing a rite of passage for fans. It just got funnier the more times you’d catch call-backs to Buster’s hand, Lucille / loose seal, “her?” Much of that is harder to land in the original season 4 that took time to tell us complete character arcs instead of telling a cohesive story. We don’t think anything has been rewritten here, but they’re just more condensed and notable now as they can appear in different characters’ stories in the same episode (e.g. Gob’s cave used for his wedding ‘illusion’ being the same sweat lodge cave George uses for his spiritual retreats). Again, these ideas were there, but they just got buried under so much focus on single characters at a time which made the previous version of season 4 just feel that more unnatural.

Yes, get away is a callback we completely missed the first time.

Character interactions make HUGE difference

Perhaps most glaring oversight of the first version was the shortsighted decision that the jokes were strong enough to allow individual characters to carry the show. We honestly didn’t know it at the time, but the show was always at its best when the actors could play off of each other. To contend with everyone’s unique and busied schedules, creators originally used creative edits and character stand-ins to shoot some group scenes but largely contained each episode to a single person, for up to 40 minutes at a time. Don’t get us wrong, they are all individually gifted and hilarious actors, but asking them to shoulder the spotlight continuously that long just sets them up for failure.

Somehow the remix fixes this. Again, it doesn’t appear as though there are any reshoots, and some of the awful stand-in work is still clearly visible, but combining scenes staring different characters in one episodes reduces the workload on any one actor and makes episode SO much more enjoyable. We can’t believe what a difference this alone makes because suddenly we’re excited about Arrested Development again, which as of May 2013, was something I never though I’d say again.