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Donald trump arrested development narrator12/31/2023 There is the matter, as with all things these days, of Donald Trump. Outside events have overtaken the new season in other ways, as well. It mocks the very idea of emotional growth or accountability or atonement, which is good for comedy but bad for catharsis. Perhaps it is that, in the era of #MeToo, the show lacks the language to address Tambor’s alleged “shameful mistakes.” By its nature, it is dismissive, and petty, and mean. Yet the latest nod to the reality surrounding the show seems flimsy and unfun. Season 4, on Netflix, reused footage from the original series, but watermarked it as the property of Fox. During its original run, from 2003 to 2006 on Fox, it often commented on its own failure to capture a wider audience and took jabs at the network for not supporting it. The series has long made hay of the meta-narratives surrounding it, and often laughed bitterly at its own expense. “George, Sr., soon realized his impression of a woman wasn’t going to win him any awards,” Howard says, in a meta-joke about Tambor’s Emmy-winning role as a transgender woman on “Transparent.” “So he took off for Mexico in his trailer to forget his shameful mistakes.” In the first episode, the narrator, voiced by Ron Howard, describes a scene in which Tambor’s George, Sr., dons a red wig as a disguise. Like one of Gob Bluth’s lousy illusions, enthusiasm for the new season, and good will for the show more generally, suddenly went poof.įor those hoping for the smoke to clear, so that they might view the new season simply as itself, Season 5 of “Arrested Development” offers no such easy escape. Amid swift backlash, the actors Jason Bateman, Tony Hale, and David Cross each apologized for their tone-deaf remarks, and Netflix swiftly cancelled a scheduled press tour in the U.K. The Times story, owing to the way that Walter’s male co-stars downplayed Tambor’s behavior and seemed to diminish her response to it, went viral-it had all seemed obtuse and awkward and cruel, the kind of thing that’s funny when the Bluths do it on TV, and not funny at all in real life. I was mean,” he said.) “In like almost sixty years of working, I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set,” Walter said of Tambor, who was sitting nearby as part of a group interview. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Tambor denied the allegations of sexual harassment but has admitted to on-set misbehavior. (The allegations were made while filming for “Arrested Development” was under way. Then, on May 23rd, during an interview with the Times, Jessica Walter, who plays the gin-pickled Bluth matriarch, Lucille, spoke through tears about the verbal abuse she experienced from her castmate Jeffrey Tambor, who had been fired from the Amazon series “Transparent” after being accused of sexual harassment and bullying by multiple co-workers. But whatever fan excitement that might have accompanied the release of semi-new “Arrested Development” material was tempered by news from the Hollywood Reporter that members of the cast were in a dispute with the show’s studio, 20th Century Fox Television, demanding that they be paid for the increased-episode count of the rejiggered fourth season. On Twitter, Hurwitz said that the purpose of the recut was partly artistic, but joked that it was also a nod to commerce, as it bumped the episode total of the series closer to eighty-eight, which is the typical threshold for selling syndication rights. First, on May 4th, the show’s creator, Mitchell Hurwitz, released a recut version of the experimental and polarizing fourth season, from 2013, turning its original fifteen episodes, which each focussed on a single family member, into twenty-two shorter, more conventional episodes. As rollouts go, the very short press blitz for the new season of “Arrested Development,” the first eight episodes of which are streaming on Netflix (with more to come at a later date), was downright Bluthian.
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