List of Arrested Development characters
Arrested Development is an American television sitcom that originally aired on Fox from November 2, 2003, to February 10, 2006. A fourth season of 15 episodes was released on Netflix on May 26, 2013, and a fifth season was released in two parts on May 29, 2018, and March 15, 2019. Created by Mitchell Hurwitz, the show centers the Bluth family. The Bluths are formerly wealthy and a habitually dysfunctional family. It is presented in a continuous format, and incorporates hand-held camera work, narration, archival photos, and historical footage. The series stars Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, David Cross, Jeffrey Tambor, and Jessica Walter. In addition, Ron Howard serves as the series narrator and an executive producer on the show.
The main characters of Arrested Development can be divided into the Bluth and Fünke families.
Bluth family tree
† denotes a deceased characterDashed lines denote adoption
Cast table
Primary characters
[|Michael Bluth]
[|Michael] Bluth is the second oldest Bluth son and the main protagonist of Arrested Development. He is the father of George Michael Bluth and widower to Tracey Bluth. In season 3, it is revealed that there is a typo on his birth certificate, which reads Nichael Bluth. Michael's wife Tracey died of ovarian cancer two years before the first season. His role in the story is that he is the one son who has no choice but to keep the family together, and he serves as the straight man in the comedy series. Throughout the original run of the show, Michael is consistently the de facto president of the Bluth Company after his father's arrest. He is the only main character who appears in every episode of the series.Lindsay Bluth-Fünke
Lindsay Bluth-Fünke is the adopted daughter of George Sr. and Lucille Bluth, as well as half-sister of Lucille, who raised her and Michael to believe that they were twins. She is unhappily married to Tobias and together they are the neglectful and self-absorbed parents of Maeby.Lindsay is vain, greedy, selfish, and materialistic, claiming to be an activist but supporting current trendy causes only for the social status. These causes have included opposing circumcision, anti-Iraq War protests, the removal of the 10 Commandments from a courthouse, the right to die, and awareness about graft-versus-host disease.
In the last episode of season 3, it is revealed that Lindsay is not actually Michael's twin sister, or even a Bluth at all; she was adopted by the Bluth family to "stick it" to the Bluth family's rivals, the Sitwell family. She also discovers that she is 40 years old, three years older than she had previously believed herself to be. Feeling that her youthful allure has now escaped her, she becomes desperate to marry a successful man, and divulges to Michael that they are not biological siblings, hoping that she can seduce him.
Creator Mitchell Hurwitz came up with Lindsay as the family's politically liberal figure, but Lindsay is also meant to represent a liberal who personally benefited from her politics more than she sacrificed, due to the image she built. This motif is continued in the series' revival and fourth season, in which Lindsay travels to India in an attempt to connect to her spiritual side and then tumultuously dates Marky Bark, a genuine liberal activist, while still married to Tobias. She later unwittingly becomes the call girl of politically conservative politician Herbert Love, eventually abandoning her long-held liberal views and finally realizing her closer affinity for conservative ones. When Love falls into a coma, Lindsay at the last minute takes up his mantle in his campaign to run for U.S. Congress.
In the show's fifth season, Lindsay goes missing after no longer being able to tolerate her supposed mother's controlling attitude, but reemerges in the final scene. The season's penultimate episode reveals through a Ron Howard documentary about the Bluth family shown to the court, that Lindsay is in fact Lucille's half sister, being the daughter of Lucille's mother who put her up for adoption.
Having previously appeared in Ally McBeal, de Rossi said that she was looking for a new series like it. She was also attracted to Arrested Development for what she thought was a "fresh new perspective on comedy." She played Lindsay as someone who "doesn't have much of a clue but... has a pretty good heart." She explained her approach by saying that, "with Ally McBeal, we were very rehearsed and staged. But this is a lot looser." Hurwitz felt that de Rossi made the character somewhat similar to Lucille.
Gob Bluth
George Oscar "Gob" Bluth II is the oldest child of George Sr. and Lucille Bluth.By trade a part-time magician, he is a founding member of the "Magicians' Alliance", a group that was formed to preserve magicians' secrets; however, he was later blacklisted by them for revealing such a secret in the pilot episode. He is known for incorporating over-the-top theatrics into his magic shows, including pyrotechnics, dance routines, wind machines, and Europe's "The Final Countdown", though his illusions often malfunction.
George Sr. paid little attention to Gob as a child and has no respect for him as an adult; his mother Lucille openly loathes him. Gob's desperate and unsuccessful attempts to win his father's approval and become the Bluths' "favorite" son is a major theme of his character. As Michael's older brother, Gob believes he is inherently entitled to more respect, and feels threatened and insulted by the fact that he is less successful than Michael. On several occasions, Gob and Michael realize that their rivalry has been nurtured by their father and mother's manipulations. Gob is known to be the womanizer of the Bluth family, though he often exaggerates his romantic encounters in what he believes is an intense competition with Michael. In fact, Gob loves Michael more than anyone else in his family and is surprised whenever Michael does not express such feelings in return. Eventually, Gob discovers that he is the father of the teenage jock Steve Holt. Toward the end of season 1, Gob, in a series of escalating dares, marries a woman who deals in trained seals. The two immediately and permanently become estranged from each other and she later becomes infatuated with Tobias Fünke, Gob's brother-in-law, and joins the army in the hopes of avoiding her attraction. A running joke throughout the series is that Gob never learns his wife's name.
Gob's character has been well received and Arnett was nominated for a number of awards for his performance as Gob including the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2006 as well as the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
George Michael Bluth
George Michael Bluth is the son of Michael Bluth. He begins the series as a student at Balboa High School, and works at the family frozen banana stand, where he is "Mister Manager." He is straight-laced, quiet, awkward, and obedient.He is reunited with his cousin Maeby in the first episode, and develops a crush on her after she forcibly kisses him. His nervousness around Maeby and his wrestling with his sexual emotions for her become one of the main recurring themes of the show. In the second season, he starts dating a girl named Ann, a devout Christian whom his father and Maeby dislike. Season 2 ends with George Michael and Maeby kissing, to his delight. After the incident, the two try to avoid each other for much of the third season. Later in the season, he and Maeby accidentally get married during what they believed was a fake wedding to cheer up Alzheimer's patients in a hospital in "Fakin' It".
They also kiss passionately after getting drunk off fake wine when George Michael, suspecting Maeby may be adopted, tells her they might not be related by blood. When his uncle Tobias, oblivious to their secret, proves to them both that Maeby was their naturally born daughter it becomes more cause for consternation to George Michael for the remainder of the original series until the final episode when it is revealed his aunt Lindsay was herself adopted, thus eliminating any blood ties between the two erstwhile cousins. He ultimately decides to escape to Newport by stealing his uncle Gob's boat, feeling he doesn't belong there anymore. Upon learning of Lindsay's origins, he reconciles with his father and finally reveals his feelings for Maeby. Both realizing that further contact with their dysfunctional family is more trouble than it's worth, he and Michael escape to Cabo with $500,000 and a house waiting for them, not knowing that George Senior has escaped to the same destination with the same plan. Besides his crush on his cousin, George Michael is also shown to be extremely close to his father, Michael, presumably with the two bonding more after his mother's death.
In season 4, George Michael is now in his early twenties and in college at the University of California, Irvine. He works on new software called "FakeBlock", together with his roommate Paul "P-Hound" Huan, which was initially intended to be a wood block app but, through several lies he has told, is now believed to be an anti-piracy and anti-hacking software, or "anti-social media". George Michael is dismayed when his father moves into his college dorm room with him to attend college, through an online university. It is revealed that George Michael and Maeby have agreed not to further their relationship, though their feelings are still strong for each other; however, when George Michael is assigned to tutor Maeby in mathematics, he takes the opportunity to try and seduce her, but fails. After Maeby, now desperate for money, tried to kickstart his FakeBlock business, she puts too much pressure on him, and his first decision with his new business is to fire her. Meanwhile, P-Hound threatens with taking legal action regarding the ownership of FakeBlock. George Michael, ultimately, under the alias "George Maharis" begins a relationship with Rebel Alley, Ron Howard's daughter, only to find out that she is also dating his father. The father and son nearly reconcile when they realize this, but when Michael inadvertently reveals that he had known about the relationship for a while, George Michael angrily punches his father in the face.