Mitchell Hurwitz's Arrested Development, narrated by Ron Howard, follows the Bluths — a formerly wealthy real-estate family thrown into disgrace when patriarch George Sr. is arrested for fraud. Level-headed son Michael tries to hold the clan together, while his mother Lucille, his siblings and their children treat the collapse as one long opportunity for self-interest.
The tree is a comic knot. Michael has a twin sister, Lindsay — adopted, though the family keeps the secret — married to the hapless Tobias Fünke; George Sr. has an identical twin, Oscar, forever entangled with Lucille. Eldest son GOB is a failing magician, youngest son Buster is a mother-smothered man-child, and cousins George Michael (Michael's son) and Maeby (Lindsay's daughter) share an unresolved attraction the show mines for years.
What makes the Bluths a genogram-writer's delight is that nearly every relationship is a lie about a relationship — hidden adoptions, secret twins, disputed paternity, marriages of convenience. Lucille sits at the center as the manipulative matriarch, playing her children against one another so that none can ever fully leave. The family is less a support system than a trap dressed up as one.
Arrested Development is the great American comedy of a rich family that cannot function yet cannot separate. Charting the Bluths shows exactly why: every branch loops back to Lucille and George Sr., and the harder the children insist they are getting out, the tighter the family map pulls them back in.
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