Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: November 14, 2004
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Arrested Development, “The One Where They Build a House” (season 2, episode 2). [Stream on Netflix.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: TV shows can be great successes in their time through any combination of ratings or critical success. One or the other, really. Highly popular shows or highly accomplished shows, both end up heralded in their day. But in order to be remembered, and this is especially true for TV comedies, certain elements of your show have to live on long past the show’s expiration date. The king of this kind of show was Seinfeld, which left a trail of vocabulary and memorable plot artifacts behind it. These were memes, essentially, before “meme” became a word.
For a show like Arrested Development, so much of its enduring appeal comes from these meme-like morsels of comedy, from Gob’s chicken dance to Tobias’s “blue” references to Maeby’s “marry me!” movie-studio refrain. One of the show’s best recurring gags was the character of Ann Veal. Introduced to give George Michael a girlfriend in order to mix up the relationship between him and his cousin Maeby, Ann’s whole appeal was that she didn’t have much appeal at all. Every time she’d appear, Michael would barely register, referring to her with a quizzical “Her?”
It started off as a fun, if mean, joke, but with every repetition (“what is she funny, or something?”) it only got funnier. What even more remarkable is that Mae Whitman, as Ann, is giving a pitch-perfect performance of ordinary-ness, a performance that seems more impressive once you see her in other roles (Scott Pilgrim! Parenthood!).
In “The One Where They Build a House” (a title that consciously rips off from Friends), Ann is introduced for the first time as played by Mae Whitman, and in the most specific, borderline revolting way possible. The way George Michael cheerfully describes Ann eating a hard-boiled egg, then squirting a mayonnaise packet into her mouth for her trademark “mayon-egg” is both sweet and disgusting. Which I guess sums up teenage love, at least as practiced in the world of Arrested Development.
[You can stream Arrested Development‘s “The One Where They Build a House” on Netflix.]
