First airdate: 7 November, 2005
Written by Richard Day & Jim Vallely
Directed by Arlene Sanford
It’s with “Mr. F” that Arrested Development at last tips its hand about what it’s doing with the Rita plot arc, and not just because it finally gives up on the ruse that she’s a British spy out to trap Michael, instead finally revealing her to be developmentally disabled. Though that feeds into it.
No, what I’m more specifically referring to is that “Mr. F” is AD‘s satire of romantic comedies and the trivial, infantilising depiction of love in contemporary pop culture. It is not particularly subtle about this: one of the main themes threading through the episode is a movie produced by Maeby’s studio, Love Indubitably, an obvious parody of Love Actually, and a film that from the little bit we see and hear discussed seems to be quite a dog; there’s a scene in which Rita and her uncle Trevor (Dave Thomas) re-enact the “uncontrolled giggling” ad-lib from Pretty Woman; and Rita herself, rolling down dirt hills and demanding to buy toy trains and wearing wacky clothing, has all along been presented implicitly as one of the free-spirited quirky girls that tend to populate rom-coms, and it’s this last part that’s especially the point. So much about this run of episodes has been poking fun at reductive stereotypes, and there’s not much that’s more reductive than modern-day (early-’90s and onward) American and British romantic comedies. By suggesting that the silly behavior and lack of well-expressed inner life typical of the Rita characters in so many movies suggest mental retardation rather than a fresh, open approach to love, the show is brutally, if inelegantly mocking the tropes of mainstream comedies. And in depicting Michael as being so willfully ignorant of the obvious – which he is twice over, since even before we learn of her medical condition, it’s clear enough that even the other characters notice it, that something is suspicious about the woman – the show gets to continue its favored theme of depicting its central family as representing some of the most selfish, shallow of all human behaviors.
And that’s also the point. While AD had become more and more of a general media parody as it went on, it was still anchored by its characters, and there’d be no value to the Rita arc if it didn’t track back to that. It is, ultimately, about Michael’s profound ability to see only what he wants to, and insofar as that’s applicable to anything or anybody else, it’s still good storytelling because of how it’s rooted in what we know of the characters. This, more than anything, is why I forgive these episodes that cause so many AD fans such annoyance: the the somewhat strained James Bond parody that the writers were too content to forget about, and the somewhat labored anti-PC fact that Rita is mentally retarded, these things are nothing against how wonderfully the episodes reveal Michael Bluth at his most narcissistic and thoughtless, without making him any less appealing as a character and a protagonist.
And boy, do I wish they’d stopped it a little faster, but we’ll get to that.
Anyway, “Mr. F” as an actual episode and not a theoretical construct is based mostly on two things: caricature and formalism. These being just about my two favorite things in AD‘s toolkit, it’s not shock that I pretty much love it, with a couple of extremely pronounced reservations. One is the Frankie Muniz/Malcolm in the Middle cameo, which is pointlessly distracting and even a little world-breaking: the show isn’t produced by Tantamount Studios, so why does AD pretend that it is? This isn’t something that happens in any of the other real-world pop culture references. Also, it’s just not that funny. The bigger problem, and it’s more because of what it portends, is the Tobias plot: I love love love David Cross’s reading of “I’ve been wanting my own awkward talk as well” and “You’re blowing my mind, Frank”, but the episode commits one of the worst Tobias sins, and it never really gets better for the rest of the season. Basically, there are three different Tobiases in the show: the one who is mostly neuter, but says many gay-sounding things; the one who is gay, but so repressed that he himself doesn’t realise it; and the one who is gay, and lying about it. The first two are funny, and the third, to me, is not. He’s just mean, and not in the vibrant, bombastic meanness that makes characters like Lucille and George Sr. and Gob delightful.
Those things are enough to keep “Mr. F” firmly on the second-tier, but there’s so much to compensate, from the abnormally broad and wacky (the Engrish and silly Japanese instruction video jokes, the various iterations of the Godzilla references and parodies – Larry the surrogate’s flat “Roar, roar” being my favorite, just barely above the feeble attempts Tobias makes to give his giant city-crushing mole a realistic motivation) to the so-weird-it’s-hilarious (Buster’s giddy, untranscribable, “Alias is a show about a spy!”) to the conceptual and structural (the South African-born Charlize Theron and her accent-mangling “You can always tell” when non-Brits play Brits, the banjo montage, the boom mike briefly and hilariously reminding us that AD is a “documentary”). And on to things that don’t really have any slot, like the “Tunnel of Love Indubitably -el of Hell”.
Certainly, “Mr. F”, like “Notapusy”, which premiered on the same night, is maybe a bit sillier across the board than AD at its best and most characteristic. But silliness done well isn’t really a bad thing, and while I am grateful that AD was able to get back on track a little in the brief time left to it, I don’t really regard these episodes as failed, just somewhat different. That sort of thing will happen in a show’s third season, after all.