TELEVISION REVIEW

“ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT”

Series return Friday on Netflix.

Grade: B+

If this truly is the last call for “Arrested Development,” the Bluth family is going out in style — as truly horrible people.

Thank all the higher powers that some things never change.

The second half of the fifth season of the Emmy Award-winning comedy, dropping Friday, finds the Bluths scrambling in their own crazy ways.

The eight episodes pick up from the previous, with Oscar (Jeffrey Tambor) breaking out Buster (Tony Hale) from prison — a half-hour before he was set to be released.

The two go on the run, which is really hard to do when their legs are shackled together.

Gob’s (Will Arnett) magic trick at the parade in which he was going to swap sexuality and emerge from a closet as a heterosexual (long demented story that only this show could tell) goes awry when that closet is filled with cement, with magician Tony Wonder (Ben Stiller) inside. Now Gob is publicly stuck as gay, and his efforts to out himself as straight draw the Gay Mafia, who won’t let him — for at least another seven years, until he ages out.

Michael (Jason Bateman, moonlighting from “Ozark”) is getting closer to the family’s financial shenanigans, including George Michael’s (Michael Cera) bogus tech company FaceBlock. Tobias (David Cross) is hiding a family in the attic. Maeby (Alia Shawkat) finds her alter ego, senior citizen Annette, is taking over her life. Lucille (Jessica Walter) and George (Tambor again) fret over how they are going to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The question hanging over everyone: What happened to Lucille Two (Liza Minnelli)?

The episodes are stuffed with puns, sight gags, innuendos, callbacks to previous episodes and the random meta joke (narrator Ron Howard gets a dig in at Tom Hanks). There’s even a “Golden Girls” riff, complete with theme. Why not?

One drawback to this batch: Portia de Rossi’s Lindsay, who ran for Congress so she could be part of the problem, is a blip here because of de Rossi’s decision to retire from acting. The good news is that she is a part of the expanded, 46-minute finale that finds Buster on trial for murder. The climax is an epic courtroom showdown between Michael, who has “A Few Good Men” on his brain, and his mother, Lucille. It’s a scene that belongs on the show’s Emmy reel.

In true Bluth fashion, what you think you know about the Bluths you don’t know at all.

While it’s getting harder to get the original cast together, this season suggests the possibility of a spinoff. “How I Met Your Mother’s” Cobie Smulders portrays young Lucille in 1980s flashbacks with “Fargo’s” Jean Smart as her mother. Smulders captures Lucille’s disdain for her tween children with biting accuracy. “Look who thinks they can wear white,” she sneers, martini glass in hand, at young Lindsay.

If CBS can drop “Young Sheldon” on us, Netflix surely owes us “Motherboy Buster.”