It seems like years since Season Four of “Arrested Development” was released on Netflix (in reality, two weeks). It’s the latest development in the Great Netflix Experiment, that monstrous new distribution model by which television watchers are chained to their sofas, then force-fed episodes like addled geese. Miraculously, I’ve hacked the system. As it turns out, it is also possible to watch the episodes one by one, separated by spans of time, just like a regular TV show stored on your DVR. Tell your friends.

Instead of marathon-watching all the episodes, neglecting my family entirely, in the middle of a snowstorm, the way I did with “House of Cards,” I doled them out carefully, like cherished Halloween candy, neglecting my family in unpredictable patterns, during a late-May heat wave. Some episodes I watched on my flat-screen; others on my computer, “popped out” into the corner of the screen. A few I watched at night, in bed, on my iPhone, using headphones, watching until I got sleepy and then finishing the episode when I woke up. This prismatic approach seemed particularly appropriate for “Arrested Development,” a show so chronologically dizzy and dense with self-reflexive jokes that it would give Lacan a migraine. (No pomo.)

Mitchell Hurwitz had a few pragmatic problems filming the new episodes, the most galling being that few of his actors were available for filming at the same time. But he found a smart workaround, devising an ambitious “Rashomon”-like structure, with each episode homing in on a different character (though a few characters are the subject of more than one). Over time, details accrete, through flashbacks and flashforwards, until we’re faced with a dazzling puzzle box of a narrative, as much like a video game as a story. Matt Zoller Seitz made the brilliant point that “the effect is a bit like starting on a Google map, zoomed in tight, then pulling out to get a view of a whole city or country, or clicking on a link in one article that takes you to another article.” The season also reminded me of the party game Celebrity—the later rounds are funnier, because the jokes build up. The show becomes less confusing over time, as we get fresh angles on various events, among them a political rally, a magic show at a gay club, a party at a housing community overflowing with sex offenders, the offices of Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, a rehab clinic, and a chaotic holiday called Cinco de Quatro.

Anyway, to cut to the chase: I loved it. Sure, the first two episodes are slower than the rest; during the second episode, I got distracted enough that I wondered if reanimating the series was worth the effort. But in episode three, there was a sad, funny sequence in which Lindsay and Tobias get upsold into buying a cavernous McMansion using a NINJA loan (No Income, No Job, no Assets). As their fantasy purchase grew bigger and bigger—egged on by a salesman played by Ed Helms—the two kept reassuring themselves with the nonsense explanation “Then we’ll have it.” The scene had a loopy, almost musical style of dialogue that recalled an old Nichols and May routine, and the joke got even better once they went into the house, with the cameras following the couple as they stalked, bickering, through empty Pilates studios and soulless ballrooms. It felt right in the show’s wheelhouse, mixing big-picture satire and small-bore pathos, and I made the leap of faith. From then on, I laughed a lot, and I honestly didn’t care if an occasional setup failed, or if the Michael plots were weaker than the others, or if some of the Mexico stuff was a little bit confusing. My favorite episodes focussed on Gob, Lucille, Tobias, and Maeby, but I almost fell off the sofa laughing during the Buster episode, which also made my heart clutch up.

Is it odd that “Arrested Development” makes me emotional? There have been numerous criticisms that the show is darker and colder than its earlier iterations, but I think that’s a misunderstanding. “Arrested Development” was always as funny-peculiar as it was funny ha-ha, refracting horrible material—like Abu Ghraib, say—into daring slapstick. The mockumentary format originated as a allergic response to reality television, and Mitchell Hurwitz’s black comedy was always, at heart, a furious and intrusive documentary investigation into a rich, spoiled family, its satire undergirded by a quiet fury—not detached, à la Christopher Guest, but enraged at the lack of love. Hurwitz documents the Bluths’ cruelty, mutual exploitation, self-righteous jerkiness, inability to stop dating one another’s love interests, and so on, directly linking these bad qualities to the worst elements of the culture. There are brilliant parodies of Herman Cain, “To Catch a Predator,” “Entourage,” the tech boom, the movement to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexican border, the “Eat Pray Love” tourism circuit, rehabs and prisons, off-the-grid activists, and especially the delusional housing bubble (“Gimme some stimmy,” the family members keep demanding, asking for some stimulus money to float them). It’s a vision of America’s problems as scabrous as any op-ed, but it’s essentially personal, not abstract, returning over and over to the shamelessness of a family that has been literally spoiled, like sour milk left too long in the Californian sun.

As stylized as they are, the Bluths and Funkes are not cartoon characters: they’re broken and empty, but they sense it—and throughout Season Four, each of them seeks enlightenment or meaning or purpose, which inevitably makes things worse. Even Lucille Bluth—a lousier mother than Livia Soprano—arrives at a touching flash of self-knowledge while under the care of her ridiculous son-in-law, Tobias (who now has the sense to call himself a “theralyst” instead of an “analrapist”). In one of the season’s best plots, the narcissistic Gob is destabilized when a prank love affair begins to feel real (as with many of the show’s plots, I don’t want to spoil the details). Poor Buster has a nervous breakdown when he’s deprived of his mother, pouring cocktails for a Lucille doll he’s built out of her clothes. And the great Maria Bamford is simply heartbreaking as a victim of the Bluths, a fragile junkie whom Tobias meets at a methadone clinic, which he mistakes for a “Method One” acting class.

I could go on in this chatterbox, anxious, overanalytical, trying-to-excite-you-but-not-spoil-or-overpraise-things, slightly defensive sort of way, but what’s the point? It’s a comedy. It’s messed up. There are ostriches running around. Sex offenders keep buying their barely legal neighbor games of Twister. Bees attack celebrities in the back of a limo. That’s the kind of show this is—it gets stranger and stranger the deeper you go. “Arrested Development” is never going to be everyone’s cup of tea: that much was clear when the show crashed in the ratings at Fox and got cancelled in the first place. But me, I’m glad it’s back. And now it’s time for a rewatch.