Arrested Development (TV series)/WMG

The Narrator is a PR person for the Bluth family, who were filmed for a reality show. He's asked to put his own spin on the proceedings, but can't change the footage.

This is why he's constantly saying things like "[certain Bluth] knew he had to do the right thing." He's doing everything he can so the Bluth's can be seen in a more positive light. If you're wondering why he's failing so much at it, well, he was hired by the Bluths.

• This would make the scene in Shock and Aww where Lindsay talks to George Michael even funnier. Without the narrator's explanation of what she meant, she seems to be offering to sleep with her nephew in no uncertain terms.

George Michael and Maeby really are blood cousins.

The Narrator said that if George Michael and Maeby ever had a kid, it would "be stupid," much like Rita Leeds was, because her parents were cousins.

• Or, they could be Book Dumb, because they take after Maeby.
• Maybe Michael was also adopted, and turns out to be from the same family as Lindsay.
• Or Maeby's father Tobias is a Bluth who was given up for adoption before the birth of GOB. He does seem to have George's hair, after all. Note also that Lucille calls Tobias a "Nelly" in reference to his Transparent Closet sexuality after Michael suspects a "Nellie Bluth" exists somewhere; just the sort of Foreshadowing the show liked to do.

Had the show continued, Michael's child by Maggie Lizer would have been important...

...and she would have named him Chareth.

Kitty used the 250 cc of George, Sr. to impregnante herself.

This is not a WMG. She almost certainly did. That's why we never see her again.

George Michael and Maeby are OTP.

Didn't the creators of the show say so?

Linsday was artificially enseminated with Maeby.

Various characters mentioned how science was involved in "creating" Maeby, and that it was expensive, implying that she was a test tube baby. But that was Jossed, though they could have been referring to her being producing in a lab and then implanted in Linsday.

• Meaning she was created "like soup."
• Since Tobias is in the Transparent Closet, it would explain how he was capable of impregnating his wife. It was easier for him to make soup in a cup while looking at muscle magazines than it would have been for him to do it the old-fashioned way.
• Or maybe she was artificially inseminated with someone else's semen. And maybe one of Buster's many classes and trials involved giving semen samples. And maybe they inseminated Lindsey with Buster's seed. Which would make Maeby, once again, George-Michael's cousin.

Rev. Veal and Eve Holt knew each other in high school.

They're both Christian--Gob even alludes to the fact that his current girlfriend in the third season, Ann Veal, the good Reverand's daughter, reminds him a girl he used to know in high school who he got pregnant.

• Eve was pregnant with Steve around 17, and the Veals probably got pregnant right out of high school, explaining why Steve is only a couple years older than Ann.
• He might have been the one to convince her not to abort.

Alternatively:

Ann is actually Gob's daughter

We know that Rev. Veal's wife is open to cheating on her husband because she comes onto Michael, and we know that Gob will sleep with anything. He mentions that Ann reminds him of a girl he used to date. Perhaps, rather than referring to Steve Holt's mother, he was referring to Ann's mother, who met Rev. Veal shortly after having sex with Gob - they did get engaged at George Michael's age - and hid the pregnancy from him until after they were married. This would also play into the show's recurring theme of incestuous coupling. Ironically, Ann would turn out to be George Michael's biological cousin, and Maeby would be unrelated to him, turning the original concept on its head. It would also mean that Gob went to second base with his own daughter, which sounds like something he'd do by accident.

Gob's ex-wife's name is Amy.

That's the name he came up with.

• Or, much more likely...
• Or much, much more likely it's a shout out to Amy Poehler, Will Arnett's real life wife and the woman who played Gob's wife in the show.

Gob's ex-wife's name is anything but Amy.

Because Gob would only get her name completely wrong.

Tobias and Barry Zuckerkorn become gay lovers After the End.

Well, they're both gay (supposedly, though almost certainly), and...

• ...this sounds suspiciously like Token Ship.
• They did make out in Reno.
  • As a ruse.
• The symmetry is interesting. Lindsay is into Bob Loblaw; Tobias is into Barry.

The TBA condition is caused by BS Syndrome.

Since we see that a symptom of TBA is discoordination, it explains why Surely is in a wheelchair.

• The dementia sets in later.

There was a mix-up at the fertility clinic. Maeby is actually the child of Tobias and Mrs. Veal while Ann is the child of Rev. Veal and Lindsay.

Which would explain why Ann is blonde despite having a brunette mother and Maeby a brunette despite having a blonde mother.

• Mrs. Veal believes making out and clothed rubbing constitute sex; she's still a virgin. Artificial insemination is the only way she got pregnant. Plus, virgin birth is quite symbolic for a devout Christian.
  • Lindsay is obviously not a real blonde. Look at her hair in the pilot and she even mentions it in the finale.
  • Ann is older than Maeby. Ann's 18 in the finale while Maeby has just turned 16.

Buster faced his fear and got his hand back from the seal.

Wouldn't it have digested by now?

George-Michael is not Michael's son at all, but a superintelligent android created by the FBI to spy on the Bluth family.

Forty-five years before the pilot, the FBI began to get suspicious of George Sr's accounting practices. So, they sent one of their youngest agents, codenamed Tracy, to get close to Michael and find the evidence of George Sr's illegal transactions. When engaged, Tracy was almost close enough to the family to find the evidence. But George Sr, through his many contacts, found out about Tracy's true intentions, but knew that telling the truth to Michael would show the FBI of his many 'friends' in the government. So, he hired Gob to perform his magic at the wedding ceremony. However, before the ceremony began, he sabotaged the machine that Gob was going to use to create the fireball, and set it to aim at Tracy's head. He also put untraceable amounts of plutonium in the chemicals used to make the fire in order to give Tracy the cancer that she later died from.

But the FBI wasn't about to let all of their effort go to waste. They created the world's most advanced android, with such humanlike features that nobody would be able to tell that he wasn't human. It even grew at about the same pace as a human, starting as a fetus and growing into a man over 20 years. They implanted the 'child' into Tracy, and she told Michael that it was his. They had the child, and shortly afterwords Tracy died from her cancer.

Over the next thirteen years, George-Michael grew and was commanded by the FBI. Every year, he used the Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work day to search through George Sr's desk, looking for incriminating evidence. Over time, they collected a substantial amount of evidence against George Sr, and on the day of his retirement arrested him. George-Michael was then told to be a watcher, making sure that his father ran the company legally and responsibly. But on the day of the retirement party, something happened that the FBI didn't forsee - George-Michael learned to love.

He had not experienced anything like it, and as such, started out being very awkward around Maeby. Over the next few months, he learned what to do and what not to do. Unfortunately for him, the FBI figured out what was going on, and made another android to control George-Michael - Ann. They also sent two of their top agents to act as her parents, which explains why Mrs. Veal had a child but didn't know what making love was. Being based on the same technology as George-Michael and with the help of the FBI, Ann was able to control him and get him away from Maeby, which as we know, worked for about a year. But with Ann still near, he knew that telling Maeby that they weren't related would put her in mortal danger, and thus had to figure out a way to get rid of her.

A few hours before Michael's party on the Queen Mary, George-Michael set his plan into action. He had found out that Ann was living with Gob in the C-Word, so he went over there to confront her. However, he expected Gob to be with Michael planning the party, not on the boat, so he was thankful when Gob gave him the opportunity to knock him out, making sure that Gob didn't learn his real identity. He then punched Ann out, and was sailing out onto the ocean to dump Ann when his father came on board, thinking him to be fleeing. But George-Michael knew that he had a responsibility to the Bluths to help them, so he told his father he was going down to use the bathroom, and then took the speedboat over to the Queen Mary.

Once on the boat, he called in a favor from a friend in the FBI, and had the SEC abandon the mission. He then admitted his secret, and told Maeby that, according to Californian law, if two minors are married they are automatically emancipated. So they moved away to LA, where Maeby continued her job as a studio executive. And they all lived happily ever after.

And THAT'S how you narrate a story.

• tl;dr
  • seconded.
  • Thirded. Real shoddy narrating. Just pure crap.

Michael's deceased wife Tracey is the twin sister of Stacey, the ex-wife of Ted from Better Off Ted.

A shot of Michael's yearbook show the twins Tracey and Stacey.

• That would make Stacey's brother-in-law's sister Lindsay and Ted's boss Veronica twins Separated at Birth.
• Lindsay was adopted out as a child.

The Bluth company used to be called BLU.

After the fact that BLU and RED had been hiring mercenaries to solve all problems, public support tanked entirely. With stock in the toilet and bankruptcy looming, Blutarch packed up his family and moved out to California, changing the company and family name. The media circus surrounding the whole sordid affair royally screwed up his children, despite his best efforts, and the company never quite managed to stay out of trouble, either.

• With absolutely no connection to the Blue-Man Group.
  • I believe you mean the Blue-man group
• BLU could just be the stock market symbol for the Bluth Company.

Michael hired the film crew.

The truth is, he's just as bad as any other member of his family, but their job is to paint him in a good light (ie, burning down the banana stand was an act of defiance against his father...he only thought of the insurance money later), and he knows how to play to the crowd better than anyone else in the family. The eventual goal is to have Maeby in foster care, Tobius divorced out of the family, and everyone else (with the probable exception of Buster, who is no threat to him whatsoever) in prison for embezzling company funds, while he runs the company alone. He has the film crew occasionally show him making a mistake, but learning from it, so that it doesn't look too staged.

The show is really Carl Weathers' project

It wasn't outright abandoned, it was retooled into a TV show that Maeby supervised. Maeby comes off better than the rest of her family does. The 2nd season only had 18 episodes because that's when Maeby stopped being an executive, she came back just because the project was bugging her and that's how we got the 3rd season.