First airdate: 19 December, 2005
Written by Mitchell Hurwitz & Chuck Tatham
Directed by Peter Lauer
I see no reason to bury the lede: “Making a Stand” is my favorite episode of Arrested Development. And coming right on the heels of “Prison Break-In”, my least-favorite episode, the timing is pretty gratifying.
Rather than going into a lengthy explication of all the things that “Making a Stand” does right, I could just cut right to the chase: it’s my favorite episode almost entirely on the strength of two sequences. First, when the narrator wearily describes how the footage of the two banana stands competing with each other wasn’t funny, regardless of what piece of AD stock music they stuck behind it: “It was kind of funny to ‘Yellow Submarine’, but who could afford it?” Then, later on, during a very similar and no more exciting photo montage, what do we hear but a David Schwartz original song, “Yellow Boat”, a parody of the Beatles’ song so perfect in its ersatz shabbiness that the first time I ever watched the show, I had to rewind the DVR to listen to it again, immediately, and then again, just to make sure I caught it all (the DVD release makes things easier: the song is repeated, with a new and absolutely terrific intro, over the end credits). Of all the jokes in all the episodes of AD that make fun of the show’s nominal documentary conceit and the fact that AD is a television show, none of them come remotely close to pleasing me as much as this pair of “Sorry folks, we got stuck with this footage” meta-jokes do.
That tracks back to the broader, lengthier reason that “Making a Stand” is such a favorite of mine: it’s flawless marriage of Season 3’s tendency towards self-referential formalist humor, and its theme of cheap fakes and copies, and Season 1’s precise flavor of character-driven stories. It is, after all, the explicit sequel to “Pier Pressure”, the high point of the first season and the only episode I’d even consider as maybe being better overall than “Making a Stand” (I’m in good company: supposedly, Mitch Hurwitz himself regards this pair as the best AD episodes ever. Though Hurwitz also likes “Ready, Aim, Marry Me”, so he’s not a good authority to appeal to), and that has a certain tendency to bring back a more classical kind of writing that works well adjoining the daft absurdity that had been added to the show since those early days. It also helps to ground “Making a Stand” considerably that it’s the Season 3 episode that works best as a stand-alone, with only minimal reference to any plot arcs in any direction, and so the writers can focus more on individual points of comedy rather than showing off structural pyrotechnics and clever narrative loop-de-loops (even with the return of J. Walter Weatherman, this is a callback-light episode for Season 3). Thus we get things like Michael’s unusually acidic snark, to Lindsay (“It’ll look like your eyes are watering ’cause you’re sad”), and Lucille (“Hope you kept your punch card, you’re about due for a free one”), Steve Holt’s! frenzied “Stick it in the what?” (a moment of silence for Steve Holt!, who makes no more appearances in Season 3 and is not said to be a part of the upcoming Netflix episodes. You were beloved, and will be missed). Buster’s Oedipal complex comes back in terrific form after having been sort of ignored for quite some time, and pretty much ever single scene involving Bob Loblaw is absolutely perfect – the editing on “Why won’t you [bleep] me?”, “It reflects poorly on me”, and the superhuman escalation of wordplay and filthy puns that ends the character’s final scene in his final appearance: “Of course, the Bob Loblaw Law Blog. You, sir, are a mouthful”, leading smoothly into “While Tobias was trying to get his mouth around Bob Loblaw, Maeby was showing Mort Meyers a monster of her own.” I don’t know what pact with Satan you have to make to be that good at dialogue writing, but I want in on it.
The MVP, though, as is so often the case in the best AD episodes, is Gob: his impressively sleazy advertising come-on, “Why go to a banana stand when we can make your banana stand?”, the earnest speech about his new Christian girlfriend, the way he folds in the second that George Sr. questions him; and best of all, the fluid introduction of brother-on-brother homoeroticism, in an erection joke that comes from nowhere, but is so audacious that it doesn’t matter. Among so many Gob moments; as much as I’ve just indulged in the hated “list of things I like”, there’s so much more to “Making a Stand” than I’ve run through. It’s that kind of episode.
What makes it most like Season 1’s highlights is not its relatively clean stand-alone gags, but the story it tells through them. This one of the show’s best character-driven stories, exploring the Michael/Gob relationship as well as it had been (and outside of Michael/George-Michael, that’s probably the most fully-realised relationship on the show to start with), but doing it using the structure of the episode according to the more formally aggressive rules of Season 3. The whole second half of “Making a Stand” is, after all, a series of twists and cons, designed to fake out the audience as much as the characters, and on first blush, it’s all very contrived. Until you stop and think less about the narrative line and more about the characters that are living through it: the multi-layered scheme only works if at the very start, Michael assume the worst about their father, and use the fact that everybody who knows them excepts Gob to fuck up and Michael to hate him for it. In other words, it’s a long con that requires not just a dysfunctional family, but that the family involved is so accustomed to their dysfunction that they can use it as a weapon against each other. Nothing is more quintessentially AD than that.
In the interest of honesty, I should point out that “Making a Stand” contains a kind of especially rare flaw: a poor line reading by Jessica Walter, which happens twice: “That ship sailed 35 years ago”, and “Except for some of the Baby Buster shorts”, the latter of which is followed by a deadly flat bit of physical acting. Alas, even AD at is best is not bulletproof, but moments like that could only stand out because of the extreme excellence of everything surrounding them.