The first three seasons of the TV show Arrested Development aired from 2003 to 2006. Hardly anybody watched it.
In its final season, Arrested Development ranked 123rd in viewership among 156 primetime TV shows. Four times as many people watched Charlie Sheen’s Two and A Half Men, and three times as many watched Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. "Arrested Development is watched by critics,” The New York Times TV critic wrote in 2004, “but it deserves a bigger, perhaps better audience.”
That audience never materialized. In April 2006, Fox announced the show’s cancellation.
Arrested Development is now considered by many to be a masterpiece. Time magazine listed it among the 100 greatest shows of all time, and IGN named it the funniest show ever made”just above the Simpsons and Seinfeld. The show received so much post-mortem love that it was brought back by Netflix for a fourth season in 2013”seven years after its original cancellation.
According to sources, a fifth season is set to arrive in 2017. And while we await that, here are some amazing clips from the first three seasons in case you need to refresh your memory. Scan the QR code to watch.
