First airdate: 12 December, 2004
Written by Barbie Adler
Directed by Peter Lauer
Lord knows how you’d even go about quantifying such a thing, but “Sad Sack” is surely one of the most difficult episodes of Arrested Development. Maybe that’s not even the right word. What I mean is that, even by the standards of a series where background jokes and semi-obscure references points had long since become S.O.P., “Sad Sack” requires that you pay a lot of attention. For example, the yearbook pages, thrown out for the sharp-eyed (or the pause-wielding) viewer to scan as quickly as possible: not only does the show go for this kind of Easter egg gag (which is not, in and of itself, uncommon), it has no fewer than four of them, and once you’ve gone to the work of freeze-framing, there are still in-jokes that further require one to be not just attentive, but to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the show: the yearbook photo of Ann that I’ve posted at the top of this review has, in four brief lines, callbacks to two different episodes, and the second of Steve Holt’s three senior photos mentions his activity for the year being Drama Club. And perhaps you recall the circumstances under which we first met him, in Season 1?
Now, referring back to a B-plot from the show’s third episode isn’t necessarily “funny” in any real sense; I call it out more because of the amount of focus and detail required to get to that level of complexity, something that “Sad Sack” does consistently. It is downright laden with background jokes, and neat little internal referencs both within the episode (“We Knew It!” vs. “We Blew It!”) and without, and one of the all-time most obscure jokes in the whole run of the show: “Sad Sack” – which I’d always took to be a generic bit of slang – was a WWII-era comic strip character created by Sgt. George Baker. He was a helpless, awful soldier prone to getting into comically heightened mishaps; almost as helpless as Buster Bluth, whose basic training drill instructor is named… Sgt. Baker.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that all of this complexity serves “Sad Sack” well. On the one hand, I am overawed by so much depth and nuance: by so many hot Ding Dongs and splotches of blue paint and medium-to-heavy treason and “The Final Countdown”, and the like. On the other, the craftiness frankly gets in the way of the humor a little bit: there’s no harm in not being as funny as the one-two-three punch of “The One Where They Build a House”, “¡Amigos!”, and “Good Grief”, since they’re three of the funniest episodes in the show’s exemplary second season, but that doesn’t change the fact that “Sad Sack” isn’t as funny as they are. We’re talking relative terms. I can’t emphasise that enough. “Sad Sack” is not just a brilliant episode of television, it’s well above-average even by the exalted standards Arrested Development sets for itself. It’s just, for one of the only times anywhere in the show, I somewhat understand the complain often laid at the show’s feet, that it’s a bit impenetrably invested in callbacks. As someone who (I think) gets most of the jokes “Sad Sack” has on display, this doesn’t especially bother me, except in that it means we get fewer new gags and more references to gags that were funny before. Gags that are, for that matter, still funny now: “smoke the marijuana like a cigarette” is too funny a phrase to wear out. But the trick of making call-backs funny because they are a) rooted in character, or b) part of a program of self-referentiality isn’t one that “Sad Sack” handles quite as well as some others, especially in Season 3.
So much criticism, though! Is this not the episode where Henry Winkler gets to say “Those are balls” in the most remarkable tone of voice imaginable? Where we see the eerie spectre of happy, satisfied, joking Lucille, a figure as terrifying to us as she is to her children (Jessica Walter’s performance has, throughout this re-watch of the series, been my favorite rediscovery; here we get to see her playing enthusiastically with awful puns and sexual innuendo: “Here you go, hot tea. Because that’s what you are: a hottie” is a stunning, stunning line reading)? Where the Narrator, previously given to mostly restrained commentary on the action, out of nowhere becomes snarky and mean, beginning a trend that finds him turning into an overt comic figure in his own right? It is all these things, and all these things are good.
The fact is, whatever problems “Sad Sack” has (if there even are true “problems” beyond my sort of weak-kneed quibbles) come from a surplus of innovation and ambition, too much almost to fit into a single episode. What remains, if it is not quite perfect AD (and it takes a “Good Grief” in close proximity to make it clear that this isn’t perfect), is still breathtaking, audacious television, and this happily slots in as the latest in a chain of excellent, show-defining episodes all in a row.