Let's assume the following logical, reasonable things about Arrested Development:

-- The first half of the first episode is real. Up through the part when the SEC raids the Bluths' boat party and arrests George Sr. All that stuff really happened.

-- The SEC investigates every penny of George Sr.'s business dealings. Admittedly, they're not always perfect when it comes to doing a skilled investigation, but let's say they dig most everything up.

-- Evidence from the SEC's digging helps convict George Sr. of the other crime he's being investigated for: what he calls "light treason" (home building in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as revealed later in the show).

-- The government calls this crime "treason-treason."

-- George Sr. is sentenced to death (the longstanding punishment for treason).

-- Awaiting execution, George Sr. is held prisoner in the awful conditions afforded to an enemy of the United States. It's very Gitmo. Or if you don't believe the U.S. would put a U.S. citizen through that kind of nightmare, fine, let's say it's very Homan Square.

-- George Sr. is a well-off businessman from a non-Saw background. Thrown into a world of horror he's not ready to cope with, he suffers a mental breakdown.

-- From there, the rest of Arrested Development is a fantasy George Sr. plays out in his mind, full-time, to avoid his pain and guilt and mortality. He's decided his real world is actually a fictional TV show, and he makes up its next developments like they're new episodes. (George also backfills the real events we've seen with details that fit that fantasy.) Remember, our brains invent stuff all the time. Our moods change what we remember. Confirmation bias helps us avoid the truth. It's pretty extreme for those cognitive faults to warp our entire reality, but "Death Row Torture Nightmare" is an extreme situation.

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Why even suggest this is the case? Because in that scenario, there are 10 ways Arrested Development makes a lot more sense.