First airdate: 25 January, 2004
Written by Courtney Lilly
Directed by Lee Shallat Chemel
I cannot shake the feeling that “Public Relations” is less than the sum of its parts. There is much that is great about it: some terrific dialogue, an important new character, some of the very best meta-humor of the first season of Arrested Development, and at least one absolutely terrific moment for every single character. But the whole thing ends up feeling less than whole, not really connecting all of its disparate elements together. I suspect that much of this can be blamed on a plot that isn’t necessarily the most interesting thing ever: it’s mostly about how Michael Bluth is so concerned with making sure that he’s doing right by his son, that he’s lost sight of taking care of himself, not even noticing that he’s making George-Michael just as unhappy by accident as he’s making himself on purpose. And that works; even works in the specific context of Michael’s decision that he cannot start dating because it will offend his son’s memory of his dead mother (though it hurts “Public Relations” that a considerably better “Michael tries to date” story is just a couple of episodes down the line). It doesn’t work, I think, when the specifically specific context of that story lies in the body of Jessie (Jill Ritchie), who is written to be far too outwardly unpleasant, and performed with a shrillness that absolutely fits the character as written, but doesn’t make her any more likable. Not that likability is a major issue for Arrested Development, but something is imbalanced when the worst person in a given episode isn’t one of the Bluths.
Still, there’s much to be very happy for, even some of the moments involving Jessie: her merciless rundown of the Bluths’ character flaws has some great moments, though the scene as a whole goes on for too long (and while I love the dialogue of George Sr.’s teleconference – “We do not wag our genitals at one another to make a point!” – it’s a concept that wears thin almost immediately, and in retrospect feels like a trial run for season 3’s Larry the Surrogate); and with my enthusiastic affection for the show’s increasingly forbidding self-referential humor in the second and third seasons, how could I possibly fail to adore its very first appearance in this episode, as Jessie snarlingly calls George-Michael Opie, only to have the narrator, played by Opie himself, spit out with more emotion than he offers anywhere else in the first season, “Jessie had gone too far, and she had best watch her mouth”.
Generally speaking, though, the best moments are given over to our principals, with Jessica Walter and Portia de Rossi having their best shared scene yet, at the family-friendly chain restaurant Klimpy’s. Indeed, Walter, in general, is on fire in this episode: she flawlessly hits several top-shelf lines – “If I still had money, I’d buy a Klimpy’s just to burn it to the ground”; “I don’t understand the question, and I won’t respond to it”; “Is this your onion?” and “Yeah. Who doesn’t love the Jews?” are personal favorites – and she has a priceless bit of wordless acting during the climactic food fight, sharing a glass of wine with Carl Weathers, the actor. For yes! it is the first Carl Weathers episode, and of all the show’s many excellent guest stars, surely not one of them was so game and unembarrassed as Weathers, playing a version of himself as a washed-up nobody whose passion for scrounging money is downright indecent. This is not, by any means, the best Weathers appearance (he does not explain how to get a stew going), but in the context of the show’s development, it’s a seismic moment: we begin to learn just how far the show is willing to take its travesty of real life in the pursuit of humor, and if we were paying close attention seven episodes ago, in “Key Decisions”, we start to realise right at this point how aggressively the show is going to plant seeds for developments far enough in the future that it doesn’t seem like foreshadowing so much as magic.
But back to the Bluths. Walter is excellent, Bateman has excellent moments (his giddy, awful flirtation with Jessie at the gym is priceless physical comedy), Tony Hale shows off an outstanding deadpan that he never had a chance to trot out again… I can do this all day. I really, really don’t want these to turn into lists of gags. I’ve said that, like, four times now. But when the gags are as good as they are in this show, and the quality so endlessly high (even having suggested that “Public Relations” feels a bit hollow for the show, it’s still a terrific, hilarious 22 minutes of television), sometimes one feels like there isn’t anything else to do.
Anyway, let me retrench to the plot and then out. As the first episode in the series where Michael tries to go on a date, this is certainly a significant character moment; but it is also forgets the rather important matter of Marta Estrella, Gob’s girlfriend whom Michael has a massive crush on and would certainly date in the space of a heartbeat, something that has been established multiple times and would form the main narrative spine of the pair of episodes immediately following this one. And he did this, it is important to point out, without any lingering feeling that his son would be offended if he moved on to a new woman. Of course, Arrested Development wasn’t a strictly serial, arc-driven show until the third season, but as the matter of Carl Weathers points out, continuity was already a major priority, and something about this whole situation feels significantly discontinuous. It’s a little thing, probably, but it’s intensified by how much Jessie doesn’t seem, as written, to deserve the mantle that the show is thus forcing on her. And for these reasons, though “Public Relations” includes several moments that are, individually, as classic as anything in the show’s run, it does not, itself, rise up quite to the level of being a great, classic episode.