Which Arrested Development Character Are You?

Learn More About Arrested Development

Arrested Development premiered on Fox in November 2003, won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series after its first season, was nominated 22 times overall, and was cancelled after 53 episodes because barely anyone watched it. That combination, near-universal critical adoration and a genuinely small audience, has made it the standard example of the show too dense for its own network, and the standard example of what streaming later fixed.

Mitchell Hurwitz built it as a reaction against everything the multi-camera sitcom had become. No laugh track. No studio audience. Handheld cameras, faux-documentary framing, stock footage, chapter cards and a narrator, played by executive producer Ron Howard, who talks directly over the characters to correct them. The rhythm is roughly three times faster than a conventional sitcom, and the show assumes you are paying attention, because half the jokes are visual details in the background or callbacks to something from eleven episodes ago.

The premise is a family of wealthy Californians whose patriarch is arrested for defrauding investors, leaving the Bluth Company and everyone attached to it stranded. Michael Bluth, the one competent son, agrees to hold it together, a decision he regrets in every subsequent episode. Around him orbit his brother G.O.B., a magician of catastrophic self-regard; his twin sister Lindsay, an activist whose causes last about a day; her husband Tobias, a former psychiatrist pursuing acting with unshakable confidence and no ability; and Buster, the youngest, who never quite left his mother.

The casting is one of the great assemblies in television comedy. Jason Bateman rebuilt his entire career on Michael straight-man exasperation. Jeffrey Tambor played both George Bluth Sr. and his twin brother Oscar. Jessica Walter Lucille Bluth is possibly the most quotable television matriarch ever written. Will Arnett, David Cross, Portia de Rossi, Tony Hale, Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat all did career-defining work, and the show launched or accelerated nearly every one of those careers.

What kept it alive after cancellation in 2006 was DVD box sets and then, decisively, Netflix. The show rewards rewatching in a way almost nothing else does, because its jokes are constructed in layers across seasons. A throwaway line in season one pays off in season three. The chicken dance, the stair car, the never-nude, the banana stand, Ann, the Cornballer, and I have made a huge mistake all entered the language through people watching the same episodes repeatedly.

That afterlife produced one of the first true streaming revivals: Netflix ordered a fourth season in 2013, structured as fifteen character-specific episodes because the cast schedules made ensemble scenes nearly impossible. It was recut in 2018 into a more conventional chronological version, and a fifth season followed. Neither reached the first three seasons, which is a high bar and not really a criticism.

Its formal DNA is now everywhere in single-camera comedy. If you want the other great dense, rewatchable, joke-per-second ensembles, try Community, Parks and Recreation, or the meaner cousin, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Now the story of a quiz that determines which Bluth you are. Take it and find out.