Netflix premiered the show’s fourth season early on Sunday, and by mid-afternoon, the reviews were already rolling in, sometimes before critics had even gotten the chance to watch the full season. Sadly, that market is exactly the same group of people who’ve already turned against the 15 new episodes. There’s a reason why there’s a market out there today for ”Buster’s unfortunate incident” earrings and cornballer infomercial paper dolls. Considering the sheer number of regular joke-jokes, hidden-in-the-background action jokes, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual jokes, and call-backs to previous jokes on the first three seasons, it’s kind of amazing that regular people could appreciate the full brilliance of the first three seasons of the highly dysfunctional Bluth family without making use of their pause and rewind buttons.
It’s hard to imagine now, but when the show first premiered back in 2003, far fewer consumers had a DVD player, much less a DVR, so there was really only one way to watch: By turning on your television exactly when the show started, watching in real time, then training your wooly mammoth to push the ”off” button with its horns. Arrested Development might be the first show that actually reflects how superfans watch television today.