Like many die hard fans, I cranked through the new season of Arrested Development like an actor drinking actor juice. Throughout the 15 episodes, I was both elated at times and dismayed at times.
The biggest problem with the new season is that they forgot that it's a comedy. Yes, a show referring to itself can be funny, but the point of the show was to be funny with the recurring jokes stemming from there. WIth season four, it seems expected that any phrase can be hilariously referential if repeated enough times. It doesn't work as well.
The old gags were there. Some were nice touches and some were overdone. The best example of well done were the Ann, Egg, Plant mix ups. The most blatant transgression of overuse was GOB (almost) marrying Egg.
Meanwhile, some new gags worked and some were too forced. There was an incidental nature to the original gags from season one through three. But as season four kicked off, the show expected us to just accept anything the characters said as running gags, whether it was funny or not. Replacing "Google" with "something" wasn't a joke and didn't culminate into one.
Bringing in Ron Howard as a regular character also came across as pedantic. Everyone sniveled before his perfect-decision-making feet. Compare that to all the original cast suddenly being stupid. Michael is just a shell of the original character. I guess maybe it's more fun to play an idiot, but it makes the show boring when everyone is stupid.
A lot of people were interested to see how the Netflix format would affect the show. It seems that it very much let the creators of the show have free range. It's obvious that this show was made in a bit of a vacuum. Jokes just keep going regardless of whether they're funny or not. The pacing suffers as no one is given time restraints or telling Hurwitz and company what's working and what's not.
Finally, pulling the characters apart to run their own stories wrecked one of the best part of the original series: interactions between the main cast. Watching George Sr. becoming a pansy for 35 minutes was too much. If they rerelease the show with a "watch the episodes mixed up with each other" version, then I'll watch it again.