First airdate: 2 January, 2006
Written by Jim Vallely & Richard Day
Directed by Bob Berlinger
Arrested Development did self-referentiality better than anybody, but even then, “S.O.B.s” is on an entirely different level than anything else in the series run. Many episodes rely extensively on the viewer’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything that has happened previously (or, in extreme cases, is yet to happen) on the show in order to understand jokes and even plot point, but “S.O.B.s” actually requires the viewer to have been watching AD at the time of its initial airing, and even then, to have been sufficiently invested in the online community surrounding the series. Though given the nature of AD fandom back in 2006, I imagine there were more people watching show who did take follow it on the internet than didn’t.
The point being, it’s an episode that is dated in weirdly specific ways, and for all that it was immeasurably cathartic to watch it when it was brand new, all the years – not to mention the long-awaited reality of 15 new episodes – leaves “S.O.B.s” almost as exhausting as it is funny. There’s just so much going on, it almost feels like you need to be watching it with a checklist; and for me, at least, is has the tendency of forcing me back emotionally to the way it felt to be watching it, a somewhat bittersweet and infuriating place to be that’s not necessarily what I want out of my TV comedies as pointedly warped and wacky as this episode manages to be in its most inspired moments.
There are two discreet levels on which the episode operates: as as a largely self-contained story situated in the third season narrative arc (though the developments of this episode are completely ignored in the final four, barring the exit of Bob Loblaw from the series), and a self-commentary masquerading as a parody of “event” television. This last element is something of a mixed bag: several of the episodes that land the best are in this vein, but the whole thing is so theoretical and analytical that it tends to put a box around the episode. If AD had an apocrypha, this would surely be a part of it: the distance it builds between it and the audience, between it and the episodes around it, is too complete. It’s as if, for one week (and, on top of everything else, this is the most chronologically isolated episode of the show, as well: airing two weeks after “Making a Stand”, and more than a month prior to the series-finale extravaganza), the writers decided to write an essay rather than a TV sitcom.
That ends up revealing itself not just in the crushing number of time-stamped jokes, be they a handful of self-aware brazen pleas for help (ranging from a www.saveourbluths.com link to the narrator’s frequent request that viewers try to proselytise) or George Sr’s non sequitur “It’s showtime!”, in reference to the hope in those days that AD might be picked up by a cable channel, but a broader consideration of what AD is, as a TV show. This comes to the fore most obviously in Michael’s climactic speech about the Bluths being hard to like, and expressing gratitude to the kindly fate that let them hang on for this long (which we can presume to be Mitch Hurwitz’s response to the fans’ “burn Fox to the ground!” campaign, conceding that if the network gave any real damn about money, AD would have been off the air two years prior; a similar joke might be the “don’t send glitter to casting agents” beat, which I have seen interpreted as a negative comment on AD fandom’s campaign of mailing bananas to 20th Century Fox), but there are other bits and pieces: when Tobias makes a reference so obscure that nobody in the room knows what he’s talking about, that’s just as much a piece of self-evaluation as any line about how the comic situations are convoluted and alienating.
This is all admirably experimental television writing, but it’s not something that’s as relentlessly easy to re-watch as the best of the best AD. There are, as always, a good number of terrific moments and lines – I’m especially happy that Portia de Rossi gets something interesting to do again after what feels like a season and a half in mothballs, as Lindsay discovers her latent domestic side (the “hot ham water” joke is an absolute treasure, as is Buster’s later reaction to same) – because as we’ve been saying all along, even weak AD is better than most television could imagine being. And that’s saying that “S.O.B.s” is weak, which I’m not sure is true. Enervating, maybe, more than weak. Certainly, it has plenty of moments that I deeply love, absolutely quintessential AD nuances like the random parody of nostalgia parody with Andy Dick, or the 1970s news clip with the single Season 3 line I have used the most in daily conversation (“It’s called a cuppakeeno, and wait till you see what it costs!”), or the Gob plotline that singlehandedly pulls the second act back to land when it’s threatening to get too bogged down in concepts, and forgets to be a sitcom.
It’s a strange beast, with out-of-character behavior all over the place and anarchic randomness to everything that is found absolutely nowhere else in the drum-tight writing that usually marks the show, but I really don’t think those things are flaws. They’re just part of the experiment, and while I would never turn to “S.O.B.s” just because I had a hankering to watch a couple of episodes, I am certainly glad it exists: the episode that pridefully demonstrates how AD is unique manages to be one-of-a-kind even for that series, and that seems just about right.