Arrested Development Season 3 DVDs
My reaction to the third season of "Arrested Development," by leaps and bounds the best comedy on network TV, and right up there with "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as possibly the best comedy on television period, was sort of strange.
Early on in the season, I had the common fan-like knee-jerk reaction that the season was not as good as the previous two had been, and almost ended up writing it off as a lost cause. Two good years was all they had in them, I thought. But oddly enough, by the time that the show wrapped up in its four-episode marathon that ran against the opening games of the Olympics back in February (thanks, FOX!), I had this weird feeling that the show was the strongest that it had ever been, and felt immensely wronged by the fact that it was being ripped away from us.
And, of course, as most things, the reality was somewhere in the middle.
The last season of "Arrested Development" (aka just "Arrested" or "ArDev" if FOX marketing had their way) was neither better nor worse than the two seasons that came before it. It was just consistently as good. If anything it was more complex, but that made it actually more rewarding when everything came to light, I think.
There were a few weaknesses, but I blame most of them on the truncated season -- it was cut back to 13 episodes from 22 very early on in the third season's run. Some of the storylines that got lost in the shuffle, like patriarch George's brother Oscar wrongly being the brother in prison in the first episode (and just Oscar in general) and older brother GOB coping with suddenly having a son on the overly enthusiastic Steve Holt (who also was seemingly just forgotten). And certain things felt a little rushed, but considering the pace of the show, it wasn't that different from the norm.
To be honest, I'm not sure it could have survived another season, though. Creator Mitchell Hurwitz and the gang wrapped up the show pretty well there at the end, and the final episode had lots of great callbacks to the pilot. It came full circle. And it was a satisfying ending.
The third season had some of the best moments and bits in the whole series, far too many to mention, but I'll note a few: "I'm acting like...an Uday lookalike," Richard Belzer teaches scrapbooking as Detective Munch, the name Bob Loblaw, MR F (which a friend of mine has rejiggered into MRFILF, you figure it out), the return of Franklin the puppet, Super Dave Osborne as a surrogate, and a terrific monster battle for group of Japanese investors.
Undoubtedly I laughed at this show more than any TV show in recent memory. And I still catch new stuff even now. It's just rewarding.
As for the DVDs themselves, they are a little lacking. I think because they crammed the whole season into two discs, there maybe wasn't as much room for extras. There are some deleted scenes, some bloopers, and three commentary tracks and that's about it. The commentaries are pretty entertaining, if not totally informative. It's cool to hear the cast joke around with each other. You can tell they had fun making the show and really clicked together. It's also neat to hear Jason Bateman constantly talk about his hair.
I genuinely have no clue as to what's good and what isn't when it comes to sound quality and picture clarity and all that shit, but for the most part this seemed as good as any other TV DVD I've seen. The picture is totally clear on my computer LCD, so I'm supposing that's pretty good. And I can hear all the characters and music, so I'm going to put a thumbs-up in the sound category as well.
But regardless of all that techincal stuff, it's worth it just to have a document of what will quite likely go down as one of the great comedies of all time. If you wrote it off earlier like I almost did, give the show a try. Seriously. I know this is all critics say, but they say it because they mean it.
"Arrested Development" is funny. Funny enough for an A, even.