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wood falls off the television cabinet again, and Tobias leans on the refrigerator and moves it backward a few feet. “Don’t worry,” he says, “it has not fallen into the garage. Knock on wood.” Tobias then proceeds to knock on the wall, at which point the refrigerator does fall into the garage. Later George Sr. thumps the attic wall with his fist, causing the oven’s overhead vent to fall on Lindsay’s foot. Fortunately, Lindsay is so loaded up on Teamocil that she doesn’t even notice that her foot is bleeding. In “Righteous Brothers” Michael discovers that the model home is sinking because the drain pipes aren’t hooked up. They just empty under the house. All that’s down there, a housing inspector tells Michael, is a lot of blue paint and some denim—remnants of Tobias’s Blue Man Group dreams and his never-nude ways.

While the original model home might deceive potential homebuyers into thinking that the Bluth Company builds quality homes, the Bluths engage in a similar form of deception in “The One Where They Build a House,” the episode in which they build a second model home to make it look like the company is doing well. Michael thinks they can build the home within two months, but Gob, who at the time is serving as the president of the company, demands that they do it in just two weeks. Given their severe time constraints, Michael tells his crew of George Michael, Buster, Oscar, and actor Tom Jane from the movies Homeless Dad and Junk (“They Shoot Heroin, Don’t They?”), that the house “doesn’t have to be good, it just has to look good.” All that this inexperienced crew manages to build in two weeks is the outside of the house, which falls down at the ribbon cutting ceremony, revealing that neither the house nor the Bluth Company is “Solid as a Rock” despite what Starla, Gob’s “business model,” suggests.

In “Mr. F,” Gob attempts to fool Japanese investors—who may have heard that the development site has a mole problem—by building a miniature city outside a window of the original model home and telling them that it’s far away. “It’ll look real if you squint,” promises Gob. “God knows they’re squinters.” The Bluths are worried that these badly needed investors will back out once they realize that the company hasn’t built anything. Just as Gob is showing the financiers the fake housing development, Tobias, wearing a mole costume (because he thinks he’s auditioning for a role as a mole) starts rampaging the tiny town in front of the horrified investors. At this point a jetpack-wearing George Michael enters the picture and knocks down the giant mole a few times. “I ache with embarrassment,” says one of the Japanese investors, who were never heard from again.

Treatment of Employees: The Banana Stand and Child Labor

“Family First” is sadly reflected in the company’s treatment of employees. Time and time again we see the Bluth Company treating employees poorly so that the company can make a buck, beginning with Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand. Contrary to the name, the idea for such a stand was not “original” with the Bluths. Although George Sr. started the banana stand in 1953, the series finale reveals that he and Lucille stole the idea from a Korean businessman and had him deported. Annyong, that Korean businessman’s grandson, would later come to live with Lucille, who adopts Annyong because she thinks the company could use some good publicity—and to teach Buster a lesson, because he won’t finish his cottage cheese.

As we know, the banana stand often employs Bluth children. George Michael spends a lot of time there, sometimes with help from his cousin Maeby—who is also later employed as a film executive for Tantamount Studios. In fact, in the pilot George Michael is introduced as “Frozen banana salesman/child.” And Michael often worked at the banana stand as a kid, too. In “Top Banana” we see a clip of hot, overwhelmed, and young Michael apparently working the stand by himself. He has chocolate on his forehead and cheek and sweat pouring down his face; the line of customers is long; and he looks like he desperately