Curse the recent trend in television of cutting 22-minute episodes down to 20 minutes. The two-minute deleted scene with Lindsay and Tobias meeting the principal is one of the best jokes to be dropped on the cutting room floor. Good thing we can see it on the DVD. But even without that scene, there's much good here. The character of Maggie Lizer, a supposedly blind attorney played by Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus, doesn't get a lot of love from AD fans. This is her first of four episodes on AD. I've heard some people claiming her deceptions became tedious after a while. In this episode, Michael has a one-night stand with Maggie, without knowing that she is blind (or pretending to be blind) and that she is the prosecutor of his dad's trial.
Again, there's lots to recommend in this episode. We have an inept and perverted Barry, looking for prostitutes, neglecting his reading and making excuses. There is a ridiculously cruel mole/teeth joke. We have Michael in high school playing a Peter Pan lawyer, singing badly and kind of reflecting school plays. Despite her unpopularity, even Maggie results in some good material. There's the blind jokes which, as the narrator points out, leads to some good non-sequiturs. The Lucille breastfeeding joke is delightfully awkward and GOB and the narrator contradicting each other is fairly funny, exposing GOB as a liar. GOB gets married in this episode, to a woman played by Amy Poehler (Will Arnett's real life wife). In the process we get the earliest bit of foreshadowing of the seal storyline in season 2. Mitch Hurwitz once claimed the series was not planned out ahead of time, that they made it up as they went along. Some of his own actors didn't seem to believe him when he said that.
In short, this episode isn't the greatest of Arrested Development's first season, or close to being so. But it's still great.
Again, there's lots to recommend in this episode. We have an inept and perverted Barry, looking for prostitutes, neglecting his reading and making excuses. There is a ridiculously cruel mole/teeth joke. We have Michael in high school playing a Peter Pan lawyer, singing badly and kind of reflecting school plays. Despite her unpopularity, even Maggie results in some good material. There's the blind jokes which, as the narrator points out, leads to some good non-sequiturs. The Lucille breastfeeding joke is delightfully awkward and GOB and the narrator contradicting each other is fairly funny, exposing GOB as a liar. GOB gets married in this episode, to a woman played by Amy Poehler (Will Arnett's real life wife). In the process we get the earliest bit of foreshadowing of the seal storyline in season 2. Mitch Hurwitz once claimed the series was not planned out ahead of time, that they made it up as they went along. Some of his own actors didn't seem to believe him when he said that.
In short, this episode isn't the greatest of Arrested Development's first season, or close to being so. But it's still great.
