This post discusses the fourth season of Arrested Development, released on Netflix last weekend, in its entirety.

“They sound like terrible people!” George Michael Bluth (Michael Cera) tells Rebel Alley (Isla Fisher), the actress that he has been dating towards the end of the fourth season of Arrested Development after she describes attending a dinner party with a conservative politician (Terry Crews) who brought a prostitute to dinner. The joke, of course, is that said prostitute is actually George Michael’s aunt Lindsay Bluth Fünke (Portia di Rossi), who is dating said politician both as an act of political sabotage, and because she’s attracted to the fact that he’s attracted to her, and that Rebel’s own date to this dinner was George Michael’s father Michael (Jason Bateman). “Oh, they were,” Rebel tells George Michael, and that it’s not clear if her statement is confined to the other couple, to herself and both Bluth men, or to everyone in the Arrested Development universe is precisely the point.

I agree with many of the criticisms of Netflix’s resurrected version of the show, which was cancelled by Fox in 2006, including the arguments that the episodes and the scenes go on too long, prompted perhaps by the tight schedules of the cast, that the episodes seem clearly constructed to set up a movie, rather than to produce a satisfying arc on their own, and that the new episodes rely too heavily on cameos and repeated jokes. But the revived Arrested Development is an interesting experiment in what makes a comedy work, and how long privilege can be interesting to watch.

The classical definition of the forms means that in comedies, everyone will be all right—if by all right you mean hitched—by the end, while in dramas, things are destined to conclude poorly. But the best sitcoms have a talent for tricking you into forgetting that their characters’ predestination. I have been utterly convinced by Cheers that Norm might permanently drop out of the workforce, by Community that Abed Nadir might not survive his encounters with the social rules of the wider world, by 30 Rock that Liz Lemon might be crushed by Jack Donaghy, and later that their friendship might not survive some of the obstacles flung in its path.

But Arrested Development is a story about people who are privileged in the most basic sense: no matter what happens to them, and no matter the circumstances in which it happens, they’re always going to be all right. Land in prison for securities fraud or commandeering the Queen Mary? You’ll find your way in with a prison gang—and in Lucille’s case this season, maybe even onto a reality show. Have your assets seized? There’s money in the banana stand, or a rent-free model home to which you can retreat. Reduced to prostituting yourself out to your wealthy, vertiginous neighbor as Michael does in the first episode of this fourth season, proposing to Lucille Austero (Liza Minelli) that they have sex as a substitute for repaying a very large loan? The very presence of a Lucille Austero in the various Bluths’ lives is a rather odd form of good fortune, but there’s no denying that’s what it is.
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Continuing the science-fiction-as-class metaphor, with a soupçon of immigration, is the gorgeous-looking, and yet mysteriously distributor-less Upside Down:

There’s a pretty clear emerging pattern in science fiction movies of physical boundaries between classes. In Time had the zoned checkpoints that Justin Timberlake has to cross through, the border fee he pays escalating at every checkpoint. These aren’t just basic visa fees: he’s got to prove that he’s got time to burn, or at least that he wants to be there badly enough to spend part of his life to pay for the crossing. When he comes into possession of a million years, the movie becomes a story about trade and monopolies. It’s not just frightening to the ruling class that the years get out into other districts, it’s that the borders themselves are permeable.

It looks like the same will be true in Upside Down. I’ll be curious to see how the boundaries between the two worlds are physically controlled (it looks like it’s a matter of finding inflection points and making the conceptual leap that allows you to realize you can walk on the ceiling), but there’s no question it’s important. The Boarder Patrol actually goes by the same name in these worlds and our own, and is clearly willing to try to prevent that conceptual realization and those crossings by force.

In both movies, there are two clear reasons that the ruling classes don’t want the borders they’ve set up to be permeable. In both cases, they’ve built beautiful, controlled worlds that they don’t want disturbed by the presence of uncouth members of the lower classes. They have beautiful things, and they don’t want to share. But in both movies, the goal is also to make sure no one realizes the borders can be crossed, that resources can be redistributed, that the system everyone lives isn’t a natural and immutable condition.

I wonder if that’s a more important message for privileged people than for the people who want to cross borders, though. It’s not like Mexican immigrants, or gay binational couples don’t already know that the system is rotten, and aren’t working to subvert it, whether they’re continuing to make border crossings irrespective of the danger or lobbying to get laws changed. It’s the folks who think that borders can be entirely secured, that we can preserve some kind of purified society, who need the lesson.