The TV show Jason Bateman called “a thousand times funnier” than ‘Arrested Development’
Jason Bateman is humble enough to admit when he’s comedically outmatched.
I’d go as far as to say that Bateman has one of the strangest and most exciting career pivots of any contemporary actor. While he was broadly associated with the “Frat Pack” movement of the early 21st century, he never had the opportunity to headline star vehicles in the same way that Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, or Vince Vaughn did. Instead, Bateman would take dramatic supporting roles in films like State of Play or Juno, and also began directing low-budget comedies like Bad Words and The Family Fang.
The notion of a primarily comedic actor taking on a dramatic role is nothing new, and it became particularly popular in the last two decades thanks to performances like Jonah Hill in Moneyball and Steve Carell in Foxcatcher.
However, Bateman showed a completely different side to his star persona when he co-created, starred, and directed many episodes of the Netflix series Ozark. The show became one of the few Netflix originals to take off, purely based on its word of mouth, and became the heir apparent to classic crime shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos.
Bateman had since starred in and been creatively involved with HBO shows like The Outsider and DTF St. Louis, but he will always be best known as a comedic force of nature because of his breakout role in the classic sitcom Arrested Development. The cult comedy series was ahead of its time, and innovated a style of recurring gags and callbacks that would greatly influence the next decade of sitcoms. It also birthed the careers of many brilliant comedy stars, such as Michael Cera, Will Arnett, David Cross, and Alia Shawkat.
Arrested Development was renewed for having one of the highest joke ratios per episode, making it one of the most consistently rewatchable shows of all-time. However, Bateman hasn’t let the acclaim go to his head, and claimed that “the British Office is a thousand times funnier” than his show. Ricky Gervais’ groundbreaking sitcom began airing around the same time as Arrested Development, and Bateman called it “comedically brilliant”.
While Gervais has become a more divisive comedian in recent years due to his railing against PC culture and the hypocrisy of celebrity activism, it’s hard to overstate how groundbreaking the original run of The Office was. The comedian had completely revolutionised the concept of a “workplace comedy” by creating a brittle, deeply uncomfortable look at how gruelling a day job can be, especially for those who deal with obnoxious co-workers or an egomaniac for a boss. Gervais’ performance as David Brent was a landmark within the genre, and it’s one that Bateman said he still looks up to as a source of inspiration.
While their shows are often seen as being in competition with one another, Bateman and Gervais are more than friendly in real life. Bateman had a small role in The Invention of Lying, a film in which Gervais starred, wrote, and directed. Although Gervais’ opening set at the 2020 Golden Globe awards was famously controversial, Bateman said that he “laughed his ass off” during it all, as he was in attendance as a nominee for Ozark.
Given how much clout Bateman has earned in recent years, it would be exciting to see what another collaboration between him and Gervais would look like.
