The remixed season no longer touts their separation as a design choice, but as a result, the show feels even more obviously like a pale ghost of its former self. The delights of the original three seasons so often relied on the Bluths feeling inextricably entangled with each other. For too much of the season, though, the reedit does little to address the problems of the original. As was the case with the original cut of season four, things pick up closer to the end, when more characters’ stories directly impact one another.

Some of that happens, and some of it is successful.

Each episode is shorter and punchier, it includes more of all the Bluths, and it’s meant to allow the stories to all hang out in the same space rather than being purposely isolated from one another.

The remix brings it closer in line with the original three seasons. So you can understand the thought process in recutting the season, especially with the cloud of season four hanging over the release of the new fifth season. Turns out, a roomful of narcissistic idiots can be funny, and it’s less funny if you’re stuck with just one. It siloed each character into their own story, which too often insulated the characters from each other’s actions. Like many a Bluth strategy, though, it didn’t work as planned. It sounds complicated and fun, and if any show could pull it off, it’d be the cannily self-referential Arrested Development. You can see how the season’s original structure could look interesting on paper: each episode tells a specific character’s story, and we follow them each through different segments of the timeline, skipping back and forth to tell the same month or year again from a different perspective. It’s not helped much by the reedited version of the original season four, which slims down each episode to about 22 minutes, turns a 15-episode season into 22 episodes, and reorders events to be closer to chronological. George Michael is making an app that protects your privacy on Facebook, a plot point also meant to be absurd. and Mexico, a plot point meant to be absurd. But it’s plenty strange to look back at the show’s troubled fourth season, and that strangeness is not ameliorated by the show’s recent “remix.” The Bluths are trying to build a wall between the U.S. That experience may feel different for the show’s upcoming fifth season, which has the advantage of being written more recently. It is disconcerting to return to the world of the Bluths in 2018.

Remix tv serial episodes