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And yet, these are features of family life that are a substantial part of the fabric of American reality. Single parenting like Michael’s is no longer an unexpected, remarkable feature. With millions of Americans in jail, families separated by the prison system are increasingly common. Young men, like the teenaged Gob, father children without bearing the fiscal or emotional responsibilities of fatherhood. There is no question that these are problems that face, not just Americans today, but people generally. What makes these features notable is not the fact that these things are happening, but the context in which they appear. These are features of family life that we’re not used to seeing portrayed on television within the upper-middle class, white So-Cal demographic, unless of course we’re big fans of The O.C. (don’t call it . . . wait, that’s actually the name of the show . . .).

Michael, of course, is supposed to be the moral center of the family unit: he’s the character who most explicitly takes it upon himself to keep the family together and to promote their well-being. But Michael has his own list of failings and familial betrayals. In romantic relationships, he’s less than a gentleman: he steals Gob’s girlfriend Marta, he culpably fails to realize Rita’s mental retardation, and he seduces and lies to a (supposedly) blind woman (finally throwing a Bible at her in court in an effort to both embarrass her and get his father out of paying his debt to society). He’s unable to actually listen to and communicate with his son, George Michael (and what father would give his son the name of the pop star and former lead singer of Wham?). Rather than supporting his son, he meddles with and dismisses George Michael’s relationship with Ann (“Bland,” “Egg,” “Yam,” “Plant”), even leaving her in a foreign country at one point.

Is Michael’s devotion and commitment to family values genuine? Or, rather, are Lindsay, Gob, and Tobias’s criticisms of him true: that his self-satisfaction at being the “good guy” is the driving motivation behind his actions, and that he is in fact only happy when he’s needed by others? Is the Bluth family—perpetually in crisis—the only context he can thrive in?

In answering this, one point worth noticing is that much of the humor of Arrested Development relies on subverting our expectations of happy, functional families. Consider Dr. Fünke’s 100 percent Natural Good-Time Family-Band Solution: the illusion of family togetherness, love, and stability serves as means of marketing chemical supplements with disgusting and problematic side effects (“Let’s take it from ‘Loose Stool’!”). The supplements—Teamocil, Euphorazine, and Xanotab—work by tranquilizing their users: they make docile bodies of volatile subjects.

For the Bluths, however, it’s only with these products that the features we take to be necessary conditions of an emotionally functional family—trust, care, affection, honesty, and mutual respect—emerge. Perhaps this unrelatability, unconventionality, and unexpectedness really were factors in the show’s short network television lifespan (it’s not as if they didn’t realize it, either!). The Bluths are not the sort of family we’re used to seeing on TV. It’s difficult to see these characters in terms of the familiar categories and roles that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing elsewhere in the television sitcom world. Lucille and Lindsay are not mothers in the same way as, for example, The Simpsons’ Marge Simpson or Family Guy’s Lois Griffin are: they don’t exist as the responsible moral center, they don’t offer the promise of stability and comfort, and they don’t serve as mere foils to their husbands’ punchlines. “If I go with you,” Lindsay tells her daughter Maeby when discussing the Bluth Company’s Christmas party, “it’ll just make me seem like a mother.”And while Maeby has never thought of her this way, and while this may make her—and the other Bluths—more fitting and robust comedic characters within the space of the show, it doesn’t make them any more likable. The Bluths