First airdate: 20 March, 2005
Written by Barbie Adler & Abraham Higginbotham
Directed by Anthony Russo
Maybe it’s just the close proximity of the majestic “Motherboy XXX”, but somehow, despite containing several absolutely brilliant bits that are as funny as anything in the second season of Arrested Development, I’m not completely smitten with “The Immaculate Election” the way I feel like I ought to be. Part of that might be that it doesn’t quite cohere as well as I’d like it to: it’s yet another in the intermittent series of episodes where the plotline centered at Lucille and Buster’s house of freakish manchildren and disturbing incestuous vibes, though awfully successful per se (personal favorite moment: “I’m half-machine!” in explanation for keeping a Roomba in one’s bed), doesn’t meet up with the rest of the episode either thematically or structurally, barring a single interaction whose only apparent purpose is to create such a link (and to set up the “I no does Buster anymore” pun, which may be awesomely bad or just bad, I am presently agnostic). And even though the two main plots (Michael pushes George-Michael to run for student body president; an ostracised Tobias figures out a way to secretly reconnect with Maeby) both generally fall under the umbrella of “parents making mistakes, and somewhat realising them”, that’s vague enough to be useless and common enough AD fodder to be indistinct, and so neither of those plots really connect in any especially meaningful way.
(Even less so, except that it marginally falls under the same theme of bad parenting, is the episode’s most individually sturdy piece of structure: throw-away gags that shade into foreshadowing that shade into outright confirmation that Gob is Steve Holt’s! biological father, all bundled up in one marvelously dense subplot of one single episode).
Certain infelicities of craftsmanship notwithstanding – and I didn’t even mention the shockingly abrupt opening few minutes, in which we find out along with Michael that Tobias was kicked out of the house a week earlier! – “The Immaculate Election” is certainly worthy of its place in the generally excellent final third of AD‘s Season 2, not least owing to what I’d be fairly comfortable calling my all-time favorite Tobias plotline: disguising himself as cheery English housekeeper Mrs. Phyllidia Featherbottom, in what the obviously unimpressed narrator points out is the exact plot of the film Mrs. Doubtfire. I love pretty much everything about this gag: primarily David Cross’s performance, of course, the most direct proof we ever get in the series of just how bad an actor Tobias really is, particularly in his shrill improvised songs about eating frosting. There’s so much to it, though: the revealing fact that none of the other Bluths see fit to call Tobias’s bluff, either out of some measure of kindness for him, or just because it’s too much of a bother; Lindsay’s garrulous “I’m sorry, this is Mrs.Featherbottom!”, one of my favorite line deliveries of Portia de Rossi’s in a season that was not generally kind to her; and in “Mr. Fingerbottom” and “Wherever your father is right now, I’m sure she loves you very much”, the show attains two of my favorite jokes in the sometimes overworked “Tobias is an effeminate gay man” running gag.
With the high-flying absurdity of that plotline providing such a ridiculous delight, the George-Michael campaign plot, despite giving the episode title (which is a further reference to the disastrous “George-Michael is virgin” angle that Ann was suggesting), recedes into the background a bit; the best George-Michael joke isn’t even in this part of the episode, but in the flashback to his humiliating self-made lightsaber dueling video (and the best part of that is Buster’s very serious, considerate expression as he watches the video). I suspect it’s in large part a matter of the forthright references to the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections (courting the religious right! refusing to put the school through the pain of a lengthy recount! baiting the voters with anti-terrorist rhetoric! Rav Nadir!) don’t play nearly as well so many years after those campaigns, and this may in fact be the most dated piece of political satire anywhere in the show’s run. Because certainly, the jokes that are free to just be jokes work like gangbusters: Steve Holt’s! very earnest travesty of the “Footsteps” inspirational story is hilarious, and Gob’s campaign video for George-Michael is pretty fantastically cheap and tawdry. And Michael’s hasty insistence that self-esteem and not to rush into a physical relationship are the two most important things is terrifically played.
The actual plot itself, though, is just… there. And it’s frankly played a little bit too earnestly for AD at this point in its evolution where even the sacrosanct Michael/George-Michael relationship has been slowly revealed to be just as broken, though in very specific way, as any other Bluth family interrelationship. Along with the tiny bit of plot about Michael and Gob feuding over the Bluth Company presidency – a bit of serial narrative so inconsequential that every time I re-watched the show, I’ve always forgotten at this point that it’s technically not resolved – “The Immaculate Election” has the feel, to me at least, of a whole mess of fantastic gags build around stories that really don’t need to be told. And please, let’s emphasise the “fantastic gags” part – at its frequent best, this episode is hilarious. But it’s not quite airtight by AD standards, which at this point were about as high as they’d ever been for any sitcom.