‘A lumbering zombie’: Arrested Development bows out on a low

Could you ever have imagined it ending like this? All through the dark years – the long, agonising stretch where it felt like we were teased weekly with promises of a revival – the thought of Arrested Development sputtering out seemed unthinkable.

But here we are. The newest, and probably last, episodes of Arrested Development are on Netflix now. You might watch them. You probably won’t. Your life will remain exactly unchanged, whatever you decide. However, now that it’s over, it might be worth officially amending Arrested Development’s legacy from “the show that was cut down in its prime” to “the show that should have stayed dead”.

And make no mistake, this is almost certainly the end of Arrested Development. How could it not be, given the near-total collapse of its cast? Think back to that godawful implosion of a New York Times interview last year, where the cast cratered out in a wave of tears and recrimination and aggressive, watch-through-your-fingers mansplaining.

Offscreen, its fallout was so toxic that Alia Shawkat has openly declared she no longer wants to be part of the show. And onscreen, quite frankly, it’s all you can see. You see Jeffrey Tambor and all he’s been accused of. You see Jessica Walter and how unhappy she is. You see Jason Bateman the steamrolling boor, you see the tiredness in Will Arnett’s face, you see Michael Cera half-arse his way through a role he outgrew 15 years ago. You see Portia de Rossi barely even willing to show up any more. For those of us who loved – truly loved – Arrested Development back in the middle of the last decade, it’s heartbreaking. It’s like watching a bunch of exhausted circus bears joylessly hopping from foot to foot.

But even if that interview had never taken place – even if the stars had managed to convincingly play happy families – this last run would still have been a lumbering zombie of a series. Technically it’s a write-off, Frankensteined together so hard in the edit that the seams won’t stop flapping open. There are scenes that almost entirely consist of shots of backs of heads, with lines cobbled together word by word from various offcuts. Sometimes the actors’ lips move out of time with their dialogue. Poor Ron Howard, used so sparingly at first, has to become a workhorse here; narrating almost every second of the entire series just to give it some semblance of form. It’s a wonder the man has any voice left.

You could forgive all this if these episodes were funny, if they contained even a trace of the spark that made its first run so incredible. But they aren’t. They’re flat and lifeless and pointless, bogged down in the machinations of a murder trial plot that constantly struggles to justify its own existence. The beauty of Arrested Development was that its jokes were packed into an impressive labyrinth of tangents and references and callbacks. Here, though, they labour in service to the labyrinth and barely get a chance to breathe.

There is only one shining light in this series, and that’s Shawkat. One of the only things creator Mitchell Hurwitz did right this time was realise that she’s grown into the best actor of the group, and thrown persona after persona at her. She’s effectively playing multiple roles here, and she manages to disappear into every single one.

But that’s it. That’s the only reason to watch. Arrested Development’s first death was an outrage, and its Netflix comeback a high-profile disappointment. But at least they were something. This last run is barely even that. The whole thing is going to sit on Netflix forever, watched once, forgotten about and unmourned. It’s such a sad way for a show like this to end.