First airdate: 23 January, 2005
Written by Brad Copeland
Directed by Andrew Fleming
I doubt very much if I’ll be going wildly against conventional wisdom if I propose that Arrested Development had a brief slowdown right smack in the middle of its second season; nor if I suggest that the first and best episode of this slowdown was “Queen for a Day”, which suffers more from being a little simple and obvious in comparison to the awe-inspiring run of seven episodes than from anything that goes wrong within the episode itself (a distinction I’d not draw for the following pair of episodes that round out the slowdown). The simplest and most obvious part of it all is the plotline that gives the episode its title, in which Tobias buys the Queen Mary gay club (“Tobias Is Queen Mary” is a fantastic sight gag, obvious or not), and gives me the best chance I’ll have until deep into Season 3 to bring up one of the handful of issues I have with the show in toto, and not on an episode-by-episode basis: the Tobias-is-gay plotline threading through the entire series sometimes wears awfully thin. At times it is source of truly inspired wordplay (the “leather daddy” incident from “Storming the Castle”, or his “where babies come from speech” in “Beef Consommé” are two special personal favorites, along with several Season 3 jokes I’ll be sure to point out when they arrive), and at times it’s frankly a bit lazy, replacing Tobias’s personality rather than augmenting it. It’s not the only character trait that sometimes gets used as a crutch (Buster’s Oedipal complex, Lindsay’s flailing attempts to find a man), but it’s probably the character trait that gets used that way the most often, and “Queen for a Day” is a perfect case in point. It’s simply not that clever of a storyline, and it sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the episode.
Nor does “Queen for a Day” have all that much oxygen to spare. It’s largely the case that most of what works really well in this episode is incidental humor around the fringes: Gob’s chain of ideas for Stan Sitwell (culminating in what by my all-time favorite blocking to keep an actor’s mouth hidden as they say the word “fuck” in this show’s long annals of plying that joke) is a clear standout, but there are line deliveries scattered throughout that are perfect (Lucille’s wicked, smug “Prove it”, Tobias’s giddy “can you believe that the only reason the club is going under is because it’s in a terrifying neighborhood?”), some inspired sight gags, and one of the show’s best meta-jokes ever, as Liza Minnelli’s Lucille Austero (making her first Season 2 appearance) grouses about untalented people singing “New York, New York”. All of which is terrifically funny; and so is most of the business involving George-Michael, Maeby, and George Sr, the three characters most divorced from the A-plot.
And that’s where the episode starts to let me down. Frankly, the main storyline of “Queen for a Day”, involving the Bluths’ wasteful spending the second that some company stock is unfrozen, and Michael’s hypocrisy in trying to keep everybody else from cashing theirs in so he can buy a sports car, feels a bit stale: it’s broadly the sort of story that was all over the first season, and it’s a bit flimsy and redundant compared to the heightened screwball logic that had governed the storytelling in the second season (not to mention that Michael’s decision to by a wasteful car is frankly not as well-motivated as it might be; I do enjoy the way that it’s based, as so many of his most selfish impulses are, in trying to please his son, and Michael Cera’s spin on “It’s not a car, but no” is the single best line delivery in this episode). Even more frankly, it’s just not funny. The final line of the episode, before the “On the next” bump, does a whole lot to give the entire narrative the structural shape of a farce, and it goes a long way to redeeming some of its problems, but there’s still not much situational humor in this episode, just good one-liners – and many of them are very, very good – layered atop the plot.
The results are still, by any reasonable standard, outstanding television: though I’m breezily comfortable in calling this a weak episode of Arrested Development, it is not nearly the weakest, or even really bad. It’s worst sin, certainly, is that it fails to live up to a standard that the exemplary second season had very quickly set for itself. There’s a huge gulf between that and a genuinely poor episode, and unfortunately, we’ll be exploring that gulf in detail, soon enough.