Critic Reviews
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78
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
84(82%)
mixed
17(17%)
negative
1(1%)
Showing 90 Critic Reviews
May 26, 2013
100
A smart, tart, daring comedy in a season that could really use one. Arrested Development and Mr. Bateman both deserve a long and prosperous run. What a nice, bracing development that would be. [2 Nov 2003, p.3]
May 26, 2013
100
The season's best new comedy - we're talking laugh-out-loud funny. [2 Nov 2003, p.F-14]
May 26, 2013
100
News bulletin: We've finally found the weapons of mass destruction, or at least one of them. The jokes fly like shrapnel in Fox's dangerously hilarious new sitcom Arrested Development, and, like shrapnel, they often draw blood...A scathingly, unnervingly comic riff on stupidity and greed in the corporate world, Arrested Development is something like a National Lampoon's Wall Street Vacation, painting its targets variously as buffoonish or malefic, but always hitting them dead-center. [2 Nov 2003, p.3M]
May 26, 2013
100
Nobody tries to be funny here, so they're more hysterical than the folks falling all over themselves elsewhere. They're simply hopeless specimens of spoiled humanity who haven't a clue how to operate in the real world. [2 Nov 2003, p.04]
May 26, 2013
100
Generous with the laughs. A wonderfully quirky and stylish series from a creative team headed by director-producer Ron Howard, this isn't merely the best new comedy of the season. It's the best new show of any kind.[2 Nov 2003, p.J1]
May 26, 2013
100
The best new sitcom to come along in years. [2 Nov 2003, p.C4]
May 26, 2013
100
Arrested Development is very animated but it is not a cartoon. Cartoonish, perhaps, but it is filled with real actors playing surreal people, all of whom have frighteningly identifiable traits and tics. Together they are the Bluths, the latest and at this moment greatest of TV's dysfunctional families. Dysfunctionalism has rarely been as ingratiating or, certainly, as hilarious.
May 26, 2013
100
There are moments in Arrested Development, Fox's new sitcom, that are pants-wettingly funny. There are jokes and scenarios that bend you over in gleeful agony. All of a sudden, with this last new fall series offering -- hope having been beaten out of all of us -- we get one of the most hysterically ridiculous half hours on television.
May 26, 2013
100
If you enjoy seeing wealthy, petty people get their deserved comeuppance, this is the show for you. If you enjoy laughing, this is definitely the show for you - the funniest new comedy of the season by a wide margin...For a show about dumb, unfocused people, Arrested Development is wickedly smart and quick, willing to go anywhere for a good gag. [31 Oct 2003, p.49]
May 26, 2013
100
What a brilliant, hilarious treasure this show is, a real work of skewed art. It's also the last, best argument against the assertion that comedy is dead on TV. Watch a couple of episodes of Arrested Development and you'll be convinced it's not even ailing. [7 Nov 2004, p.1E]
