As
Arrested Development leaps into its first season, hard-working Michael Bluth (
Jason Bateman) is on the brink of starting a new life in Arizona with son George Michael (
Michael Cera) when he is dragged kicking and screaming back to California, there to take charge of his family's business when his light-fingered father, George Sr. (
Jeffrey Tambor), is jailed for fraud and the company's assets frozen. Though he had fondly assumed he'd seen the last of his vituperrious mother, Lucille (
Jessica Walter), and his lazy, self-indulgent siblings, he was forced to hunker down and teach them how to behave (and spend!) more responsibly. As Michael's airheaded would-be-activist twin sister, Lindsay (
Portia de Rossi), her sexually confused ex-doctor hubby, Tobias (
David Cross), and their out-of-control daughter, Maeby (Alia Shawkat), move in with Michael, older brother Gob (
Will Arnett), a spectacularly unsuccessful and untalented magician, must face the prospect of actually getting a
real job, while the "baby" of the family, Michael's feckless kid brother, Buster (Tony Hale), remains sequestered in his mommy's Balboa Bay condo. Michael's well-ordered world doesn't take very long to unravel; by the second episode, his darling son George Michael has set fire to the Bluths' frozen-banana stand in Newport Beach, and has developed a borderline-incestuous crush on cousin Maeby. A few weeks later, Lucille Bluth's neurotic social rival Lucille Austero (
Liza Minnelli) has entered into an affair with the much, much, much younger Buster, an act that will eventually move Buster's mom to spitefully adopt a Korean orphan named Annyong (Justin Lee). Meanwhile, Michael finds it next to impossible to break up the doomed romance between brother Gob and his girlfriend, Marta (
Patricia Velasquez), and to fire such millstones around the Bluths' necks as hopelessly inept family lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn (
Henry Winkler) and blackmailing company secretary Kitty Sanchez (
Judy Greer).
Among the supporting actors entering into the lunacy are
Rocky co-star
Carl Weathers, who makes the first of several self-deprecating appearances as himself in the episode wherein George Michael is forced to hire a public relations service to gain entrance to a private school;
Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton as the warden in the prison where George Sr. is wasting away, so to speak;
Seinfeld veteran
Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the sight-challenged attorney Maggie Lizer, who plays up to Michael while trying to dig up more damaging dirt on his family's business practices; and series regular
David Cross' longtime Mr. Show cohort
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