Each story revolves around the same three or four scenes, like George Michael’s high-school graduation and a fundraiser / concert / room filled with awkward people for Herbert Love’s campaign. Everything comes to a head on Cinco de Cuatro, a holiday invented by the Bluths to use up all the party decorations and keep their housekeeper from leaving every year to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

The storytelling structure is an obvious way to get around the actors’ busy schedules, and points to the original goal of releasing episodes with no set order, but the strange Rashomon effect doesn’t always work. It just creates a lot of overlap — a few moments appear six or seven different times — and a lot of confusion about what’s happening and when.

The Bluths may not have changed, but the actors' lives certainly have. Creator Mitch Hurwitz has said Tony Hale was particularly hard to get because he’s also shooting Veep, and other actors were similarly difficult — Arrested Development launched many careers, and it lead to only two days with the whole cast on set at the same time. It results in clear troubles with telling the story coherently, and more than a few scenes are so unrealistic the crew might as well have left the green screen in the shot with Portia De Rossi and David Cross.

So much of the fun of Arrested Development was just watching these dysfunctional people be near each other, and there's precious little of it in season four. Some characters are also just gone, for episodes at a time. We see far too little of GOB and Buster, two of the show's most interesting and compelling characters, and as a result we're forced to spend way too much time with both real-life Ron Howard (as part of a subplot around making what is presumably the Arrested Development movie) and narrator Ron Howard.

The seventh episode, where we finally spend some quality time with GOB, is where season four finally rises to Arrested Development standards. GOB takes his guy-in-a-$10,000-suit stammering to new levels, and gives Steve Carell's Bruce Almighty performance a run for its money. GOB's episode also brings Steve Holt back, who steals the whole season before he even says a word.

The momentum continues from there through to the end, with only a clunker or two in between – as the disparate stories start to clash, the show regains its old luster. Plus, it takes eight or so episodes to take each character's pursuits to their bizarre, narcissistic extremes, which is where, say, Michael comes alive in a guilt-trip game of chicken with his son over a series of escalating voicemails. Tobias' story was my favorite, following him as he trades his analrapist hat for something almost as wonderful.

The original plan for this season of Arrested Development was 10 episodes, and Netflix should've stuck to it, especially since Hurwitz and co. don’t have to bend over backwards to make each episode stand on its own. There is an order now, and with it comes freedom the crew should have taken advantage of. As is, the show leans too heavily on what's basically a "previously on Arrested Development…" crutch in the middle of episodes, which flits between unnecessary and downright boring.

But even if there’s a bit too much of it, the show is still fun, funny, and as weird and watchable as ever. I can’t wait to watch it all again, when it’s not 4:12 in the morning — knowing what I know now, I think I might even like the first few episodes more the second time.

Season four is absolutely worthy of the Arrested Development name, though you'll have to slog through three episodes before it becomes so. And trust me: don't watch the show without having seen the first three seasons, and maybe re-watch them again just in case. Even for all its heavy-handed exposition, the show introduces basically no new running jokes or motifs, and if you don't know about the too-literal doctor or Gene Parmesan, you're in rough shape.