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Reviews
Arrested Development: Hand to God (2005)
Maggie Lizer, please go away
I already ripped apart the character in my review of the last episode, and I stand by everything I said. Maggie being recycled for a plotline derivative of her first is a waste of everyone's time. Add to that her general unlikeability and it makes for some excruciating TV every time we see how stupid Michael acts in regard to her. Yes, he has a weakness for women, but why this one? She is so horrible that it's honestly baffling.
Buster's hilarity in the scene where they visit him in the hospital is so funny that it boosts this one from a 3 to a 6. The rest is AD at its worst. I love the show but I just was not feeling this episode.
Arrested Development: Out on a Limb (2005)
Among my least favorite in the first 3 seasons
It's tempting to rate this episode high for it's iconic ending, but when you look at the big picture, it's just not that good. The return of Maggie Lizer is among AD's roughest stretches. She contributes nothing new this time around, living out a plot so derivative of her previous one that you could get credit for Calculus by watching it. In addition, Michael's stupidity just feels too forced. Yes, he's had a weakness for women, but the way he lets Maggie lead him by the nose after so clearly seeing her for what she was last time around is absurd, even for him. But as annoying is Michael is, he's no match for Maggie, who somehow manages to be too horrible a person for the AD universe, I think in part because, unlike most of the show's jackasses, she never seems to pay the price.
Arrested Development: Ready, Aim, Marry Me (2005)
Hysterical!
"Swoop me!"
"To the nuts!"
Uncle Jack has me in tears of laughter every time I watch this episode. Martin Short's high energy performance for a half-paralyzed man is a true gem (well, aside from the 5 seconds of vomiting). The Bluth family's reactions make it even better. ("Is he dying? What if he's dying?") PLUS we get Buster and G.O.B.'s tracking adventure and Tobias's tape recorder.
Seinfeld: The Finale (1998)
Just plain bad
After Larry David's departure, Seinfeld weakened as a show, in part because it moved away from being a realistic show with a few quirks to being downright surreal. People were willing to shrug it off for awhile, particularly because it still struck gold from time to time (George's answering machine has its place in the Seinfeld Hall of Fame, no doubt), and also because it retained enough of its old habits to keep most fans satisfied.
The finale, however, magnifies how handicapped the show really became without its star writer. So much is wrong here. Why does Kramer allow this man to be mugged? He has always shown a higher morality. And why are the other three being so especially cruel? It's a stretch to say the least.
Perhaps one could forgive that if it led to something worthwhile but... Nope. Instead we got a glorified clip show of periphery characters. So much of it is cut down to recapping the show that little time remains, and the few scenes which aren't flashbacks are incredibly uninspired as well. The jokes are lazy and heavily non sequitur. Jackie Chiles serves virtually no function other than to be the "funny black lawyer xD", that and to callback the "they're real and spectacular" line in a rather unfunny and forced way. The clips of news people are out of place and awkward.
The biggest sin of this finale though, is its linear and boring plot line. A huge part of what made Seinfeld so great throughout the years was its ability to take multiple seemingly unrelated story lines and somehow, at the final minute, mesh them all together in the perfect catastrophe/punchline. Larry David knew how to tell the perfect 22 minute joke. But sadly that part of the show, perhaps one of its three defining features (along with being about nothing and revolving around narcissists), largely melted away with his departure. And nowhere is it worse than here. From the moment the gang is arrested nothing new develops. There is no climax. It's unforgivably bad.