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March 28, 2024, 07:14:38 PM

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Arrested Development Season 5 - Partially A Prequel???

Started by Small Man Big Horse, January 24, 2017, 01:27:47 PM

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AsparagusTrevor

Quote from: steveh on March 23, 2019, 02:34:50 AM
I went into the second half with no expectations and ended up quite enjoying it. Yes there's annoyances and the ending is a bit "is that it?" but there's enough laughs to make up for the deficiencies.

Having to watch this in stereo this time the sound mix is rather cluttered in places, with several places with Ron Howard and scene actors talking over each other.
The sound is poor all round, you can really tell where audio has been spliced and dubbed. There was some particularly awful ADR when George Michael and Michael were talking in the attic, the lip sync was way out.

NoSleep

Quote from: phantom_power on March 22, 2019, 11:56:24 AM
For me the over-abundance of plot and trying to shoehorn explanations left right and centre is part of the humour.

That's true but it was often seamless (not always perfect, true) in the first three seasons and here it was clogging things up.

AsparagusTrevor

I've just finished the last batch, thought it was awful - just incoherent, meandering, unfunny. I think I had two laughs out of the whole thing. It's not even worth the novelty of having the characters back together since they either don't resemble themselves any more or have become ridiculous caricatures. I do wonder if watching the whole season together without the daft gap would've made it better but I can't see myself trying.

Let it die now please, Netflix.

ajsmith2

Don't worry, I'm pretty sure that was definitely meant to be the definitive end.

I thought the finale was not bad in terms or tieing up loose ends and putting a tin hat on the thing, but the series as a whole was spotty and legacy tarnish (not ruin) -ing. I LOVE season 4 btw.

BritishHobo

It won me over a bit but it felt more like leftover affection, seeing (most of) the characters bouncing off each other again, rather than anything the series did. It started to get back into Arrested Development rhythm as the plots came together towards the end, but fuck me if the long gaps between season 4/5 and season 5a/5b, plus the endless 'previously on' stuff from Ron Howard didn't make it hard to get there. Mad to think it's taken six years to get that pay-off as to what exactly happened with Michael and Lucille 2.

DrGreggles

Just finished it and, while obviously not being peak AD, it was decent enough and ties everything up to bow out.
Shame they didn't really have a storyline for Tobias, but there still plenty of great lines and big laughs. As ever, there'll probably even more when I rewatch it.

Clownbaby

Right Itch hire it lad you've successfully out stayed your welcome and made a fabulous show less fabulous by stretching it too thin

Doin a Dan Harmon are we

Nowhere Man

I enjoyed it, but by god if it didn't take a long fucking time to get through all that. I don't know how anyone is able to watch all of those in one go.

Something very ironic about the series being less bingeable during the Netflix seasons.

Mobius

I really don't like that Dusty bloke, or Tobias's kid, or Lotte Dotte Da

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: Mobius on March 28, 2019, 12:56:01 AM
I really don't like that Dusty bloke, or Tobias's kid, or Lotte Dotte Da

I didn't mind the kid (though he rarely made me smile, let along laugh) but yeah, the others were pretty awful, Dusty especially.

Mobius

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on March 28, 2019, 06:32:45 PM
I didn't mind the kid (though he rarely made me smile, let along laugh) but yeah, the others were pretty awful, Dusty especially.

Oh yeah I like Kyle Mooney usually - just found his character in this utterly unfunny and a waste of his comedic talents really. (was equally redundant in S5 part 1) Tobias having a pink beard didn't help much. Really both of them + Maria Bamford just had nothing to do all season it seems.


popcorn

That anyone can have found S5 or S4 watchable is extraordinary to me. With basically every other thing that anyone likes ever, even when I hate it I don't find it difficult to imagine the appeal of it. But these last seasons have just been completely nonfuctional. It blows my mind when I see anyone speaking well of them. I can't fathom it.

NoSleep

S4 is much better than S5, though, and although S4 is a way down from S1, 2 & 3, it did seem like they were trying.

ASFTSN

That protracted scene with Michael driving and talking to Buster on the phone, with the glare of the sun on the windscreen superimposed over his mouth so you can't see that the dubbed dialogue doesn't match his mouth movements - that was beyond parody. It was the sort of thing AD would have put in deliberately as a joke in earlier series. Insane.

Ant Farm Keyboard

I've finished the half-season. In other times, I would have binged on the episodes... or I would have tried not to rush into it, trying to save great moments for a rainy day. But I just couldn't get into it, apart from a few select scenes, mostly the last ten minutes, and I was mostly indifferent. I tried to finish it more by obligation than by anything else.

The main feeling I got from this latest bunch is that Mitchell Hurwitz tried desperately to return to the pace and the energy of the early years. But he got it all wrong. The early seasons were frantic because they were so filled with jokes and great ideas, the main plot of an episode had to be wrapped up by its end (and they only had 21 minutes), then Hurwitz and the other writers would allude to longer themes and plots, with some foreshadowing and callbacks. This time, he favored agitation and movement even if there was very little motivation for it. Some plots take an eternity to build up, some others are dismissed early on (Oscar is basically left out of the picture). And never the writing answers a very basic question: why should we care?

The feeling I got from all of this was that it's a show in its middle-age that tries desperately to look as edgy and cool as a brand new effort, and shows instead how exhausted it is. There's a lot of pointless shuffling that tries to say this is not season 4 anymore, but the agitation never amounts to anything. And I never got any sense of relative closure by the end of an episode.
Sure, I have my reservations on season 4, but the best parts of it were a delight and Hurwitz managed to use a few constraints at his advantage by giving belated reveals that still made a lot of sense. Here, almost everything collapses. Tobias, GOB, Oscar have basically very little to do.

Now, for the spoilery stuff...

- Having Buster killing Mimi then Lucille II doesn't really work to me. It's just sour. The reenactment showed promises (Cobie Smulders and Taran Killam were wonderful as pretend Lucille and George, their pick for young Lindsay was inspired), then it morphs into something that's melodramatic... and random.
- The Guilty Guys was a fine joke, marred by the fact that there was a long buildup to a very minor reveal.
- The Chinese stuff was bland and lifeless. If I remember well, the roots of it come from Lucille being in jail next to a Chinese crime lady.
- The joke about Michael not noticing that Fakeblock didn't really exist was stretched out for much too long. It worked during season 4, when the audience was kept in the dark, then for a few episodes, but they forget that it took six years to finally conclude that.
- That said, I loved the ending at the party. For a while, we have the feeling it will be an umpteenth instance of the Bluths feuding and sabotaging their own opportunities at success, then the reveal it was all pretend felt very satisfying, as they had never achieved such a masterplan before.


What's great is that I will not ask any longer for new episodes. The show has clearly run its course. Sure, it mostly ran in the ground during the second part of season 5, but never ever will I assume it would be criminal not to reunite this bunch of talented people for this show.

RenegadeScrew

Quote from: ASFTSN on March 29, 2019, 01:24:51 PM
That protracted scene with Michael driving and talking to Buster on the phone, with the glare of the sun on the windscreen superimposed over his mouth so you can't see that the dubbed dialogue doesn't match his mouth movements - that was beyond parody. It was the sort of thing AD would have put in deliberately as a joke in earlier series. Insane.

Yeah, I've only watched it once through but I'd assumed I was missing a joke in the earlier scene with George Snr and Oscar talking across the changing booths where half the dialogue is played out with their mouths hidden.  They are both played by the same actor so it seems even more pointless and ridiculous.  It's the sort of thing I don't usually notice until someone points it out on a thread like this so it must really really stick out!

Sadly if it was put in as a joke, I'm not sure I'd be rewatching it to actually get it.  I didn't even rewatch the first half of s05 before watching the second half.  When I discovered AD, I used to watch it virtually on repeat.  I'd finish s03 and start watching from the beginning again all in the same evening.  I found this more difficult to get through than the first half of the season, and the middle few episodes were as difficult on first viewing as some of the s04 stuff was upon rewatching (eg. Lucille's episode).

DISCLAIMER: I don't know what I'm talking about.  I think it tried to become too much like a real sitcom.  Maybe someone who understands plots/etc can comment, but AD was never about the plot.  Normal shows are enjoyed as whole episodes like Mark almost getting married in Peep Show or Del Boy winning a game of cards.  If OFAH was AD then it would be all about "lovely jubbly" and "fancy a curry" rather than big stuff like falling through bars or falling chandeliers.

"Let Lily lick Lionel's lusty leathers"


Twilkes

Working through original AD again now - S1 was amazing, S2 is just as good but with maybe more 'miss' episodes, and we've not made it onto S3 yet but remember it got more surreal.

I lost interest in S4 very quickly when it was released, and will probably give S5 a miss as it doesn't sound like it's much better, but did the 'Tobias is black' thing ever get addressed? I'm picking up on the veiled references to it even more this time round in the original.

Mobius

They never outright confirm it, but there's so many references that Tobias being a black albino was definitely a thing.

I don't think Series 4 is that bad really, considering how much later it came and the change in format. Obviously not as good as the earlier series. Just way too much Ron Howard narration, and it's really obvious they struggled to get the entire cast together for filming.

Series 5 is absolute dogshit and just depressing to see all of their old faces. Plus you find out Tambor was a bullying cunt irl to Jessica Walters and it ruins the whole thing.

Mister Six

Quote from: Twilkes on April 07, 2022, 10:00:29 PMWorking through original AD again now - S1 was amazing, S2 is just as good but with maybe more 'miss' episodes, and we've not made it onto S3 yet but remember it got more surreal.

I lost interest in S4 very quickly when it was released, and will probably give S5 a miss as it doesn't sound like it's much better, but did the 'Tobias is black' thing ever get addressed? I'm picking up on the veiled references to it even more this time round in the original.

Didn't get brought up in 1-4; I didn't bother with 5.

Try watching the "Fateful Consequences" version of 4, which recuts them into 20-minute episodes. You lose some gags, gain some others, but on the whole I think it's an improvement, as the switch to Netflix brought with it a self-indulgence that left many of the episodes feeling saggy and joyless. Who wants to spend 50 minutes on George Sr's kibbutz?!

It's not helped by the switch to flatly lit HD digital video. You lose the bright, cartoony quality of the first three seasons.