Arrested Development Turns 20: Now the Story of a Wealthy Family Who Lost Everything

The pilot episode of Arrested Development, which aired in November 2003, closes its first act with the central family hijacking a party boat to outrun the Security Exchange Commission. Family patriarch and real estate CEO (George Sr.) is arrested by the SEC for defrauding investors and the misuse of company funds. This is our introduction to the Bluths. 

Arrested Development came out on the heels of massive corporate scandals like Enron and Adelphia. In 2001, Enron was the largest bankruptcy filing in US history, and soon people formerly only mentioned in the business section became household names and CEOs were handcuffed on TV.  

In the 20 years following the Arrested Development pilot, the US saw the subprime mortgage crisis, the fall of financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Great Recession, and the Bernie Madoff scandal. 

Arrested Development was an early adapter to the changing economic mood of the country in the 2000s, and doing so, it left a legacy of other popular “Riches To Rags” shows like 2 Broke Girls and Schitt’s Creek.

“You’re gonna get some hop ons.”

From 2003 on, the idea of losing wealth in public scandals became so normalized that it was the topic of these three major comedies. As the anti-elitist and populist movements on both sides of the aisle grew, Arrested Development and its successors (or “hop ons”) created a new American comedy to mirror public sentiment.

Arrested Development, Schitt’s Creek  and 2 Broke Girls start out similarly—within the first three episodes there’s a newsworthy scandal causing the government to freeze the central family’s funds and repossess their assets. Our main characters face lifestyle changes and end up in closer-than-comfortable living situations.

As the blueprint (Bluthprint?), Arrested Development is the sharpest satire. Shot in single camera, vérité style to mirror the growing trend of reality TV, the show has little sympathy for the Bluths. Practically all the adult characters (with the exception of Michael) are complicit in one way or another, spending company money at their leisure and collecting idle paychecks. Every Bluth is a schemer to some degree: detached, delusional, and self-interested. Regular people become collateral damage for their antics, such as the family’s housekeeper Luz dragging a rack of Lucille’s furs to hide from the government across town on multiple buses, Johnny Bark abandoning his tree post after falling for Lindsay’s vanity protest, and Helen Maria Delgado’s accidental kidnapping.

2 Broke Girls, which premiered in 2011, centered on Caroline Channing, the rich, well-educated, naïve daughter of the Madoff-like figure Martin Channing. The show took what Arrested Development did and made it multicam, colorful, and broader in its satire. Schitt’s Creek aired in 2015, and by then a loss of money for a wealthy family was no longer novel. The tone was silly and focused more on the fish out of water aspects of the once-affluent Roses, who were spoiled, but pretty much harmless. The show poked fun at the rich and sheltered family, but gently… it was, after all, created by the Levys.  However, what was consistent across all three shows was their portrayal of the ultra wealthy as out of touch and bumbling, and the joy the sitcoms took in portraying their struggles.

“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”

In Arrested Development and 2 Broke Girls, the older generation (George Sr., Lucille, and Martin Channing) is a lost cause. Their comedy is in their over-the-top and absurd criminality, their villainy, and their manipulative nature. (Notably, this is less true in Schitt’s Creek, where no one in the actual family is directly responsible for their loss… once again, look to the creators.)

The responsibility of the family name, rebuilding, survival, etc. falls to their kids, who are all different levels of ignorant, immature, self-centered, and helpless. If the American ideal is the self-made man, then Michael, GOB, Buster and Lindsay Bluth; Caroline Channing; and Alexis and David Rose are the antithesis of what we’ve been taught to value. They were handed everything and now have nothing. 

There is still a sort of justice entrenched in these narratives; those who don’t properly earn or deserve their riches will lose them, and they can only begin their upward mobility again through doing things the right way. Michael Bluth tries desperately to keep his family together by trying to make the business honest. Caroline Channing wants to work hard and save up to create a cupcake business with her roommate (it was the 2010s, cupcakes were big). Alexis Rose goes back to school, David Rose creates the Rose Apothecary. The new generation provides our stories, and asks if they can change for the better. While this leads to positive growth in 2 Broke Girls and Schitt’s Creek, in Arrested Development (true to its title) characters resist change. 

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

20 years later, despite all the Iraq War jokes, Arrested Development still feels like the most relevant of these three shows. In spite of all its farcical storytelling, something about the Bluths comes across as more real. They were less over-the-top wealthy than the Channing and Roses, and they also never hit as hard of a rock bottom. They never fixed their business or started a successful new venture, they didn’t make new working-class friends, and they didn’t learn any lessons (despite J. Walter Weatherman’s best efforts). 

While the other shows dealt with the push/pull of the families’ old lives until the characters eventually preferred their new self-made ones, the Bluths repeated cycles, went in and out of jail, continually hid and destroyed evidence, fired and rehired employees, committed “light” treason, and became what we needed them to be—not easy to like, but easy to laugh at. 

The show remains a shrewd early indicator as to the wants of comedy audiences entering the turbulent economic decades of the 2000s. It gives us the satisfaction that these con artists at the top are exactly who we think they are. 

“There’s always money in the banana stand.”

You won’t go broke betting on the American fascination with wealth, even when the system seems broken. But there’s no comedy in honest people losing their jobs, homes, pensions, and 401ks due to the corruption, greed, and incompetence of powerful figures. Yet there’s a catharsis in laughing at the Bluth siblings living together in a model home, driving the stair-car, and working a variety of odd jobs (construction, reception, retail, “army,” etc). 

The fun of these shows partially derives from a desire for karmic retribution, seeing these characters bewildered, witnessing them struggle with normalcy, and knocking ‘em down a peg. In these sitcoms, punchlines are reserved for rich folks who can’t function like normal people, but redemption can only come when money is made ethically, values shift, and breakfast family comes first.

Carly Silverman is a writer and producer who’s worked in television + digital media. You can catch her doing comedy with Young Douglas, or here on X. She really wants to tell you what perfume she’s wearing.