The plot of Arrested Development revolves around the members of the Bluth family, a formerly wealthy family who continue to lead extravagant lifestyles despite their changed circumstances. At the center of the show is Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), the show's straight man, who strives to do the right thing and keep his family together, despite their materialism, selfishness, and manipulative natures. Michael is a widowed single father. His teenage son, George Michael (Michael Cera), has the same qualities of decency but feels a constant pressure to live up to his father's expectations and is often reluctant to follow his father's plans. He battles with a crush he has on cousin Mae "Maeby" Fünke (Alia Shawkat), which developed from a kiss she gave him as part of a prank.

Michael's father, George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), is the patriarch of the family and a corrupt real estate developer who is arrested in the first episode. George goes to considerable lengths to manipulate and control his family in spite of his imprisonment, and makes numerous efforts to evade justice. His wife, and Michael's mother, Lucille (Jessica Walter), is ruthlessly manipulative, materialistic, and hypercritical of every member of her family, and constantly drinks alcohol. Her grip is tightest on her youngest son, Byron "Buster" Bluth (Tony Hale), who is overeducated on various random subjects but lacks emotional intelligence or common sense. Buster is also a mother's boy who has dependency issues and is prone to panic attacks.

Michael's older brother is George Oscar Bluth II (Will Arnett), known by the acronym Gob, which is pronounced in the series like the Biblical figure Job (/dʒoʊb/). An unsuccessful professional magician whose business and personal schemes usually fail or become tiresome and are quickly abandoned, Gob is competitive with Michael and bullies Buster. Michael's twin sister, Lindsay (Portia de Rossi), is spoiled and materialistic, continually seeking to be the center of attention and espousing various social causes for the sake of vanity. In the finale, it is revealed that she and Lucille are sisters. She is married to Tobias Fünke (David Cross), a discredited psychiatrist-turned-aspiring actor. Tobias is a self-diagnosed "never-nude" (a disorder comparable to gymnophobia), whose language and behavior have heavily homosexual overtones to which he seems oblivious and which are the center of much tongue-in-cheek comedy throughout the series. Their daughter, Maeby, is a rebellious teen with an opportunistic streak, who seeks to defy her parents for the sake of attention, and otherwise pursues boys and power, and furthers her complicated relationship with George Michael.
Several other characters regularly appear in recurring roles.
• Jeffrey Tambor as Oscar Bluth, George Sr.'s identical twin br…

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George Bluth Sr., patriarch of the wealthy Bluth family, is the founder and former CEO of the successful Bluth Company which markets and builds mini-mansions among many other activities. His son Michael serves as manager of the company, and, after being passed over for a promotion, decides to leave both the company and his family. Just as he makes this decision, however, George Sr. is arrested by the Securities and Exchange Commission for defrauding investors and gross spending of the company's money for "personal expenses". His wife Lucille becomes CEO, and immediately names as the new president her extremely sheltered youngest son Buster, who proves ill-equipped, as his only experience with business is a class he took concerning 18th century agrarian business. Furious at being passed over again, Michael secures another job with a rival company and plans on leaving his family behind for good. Realizing that they need Michael, the family asks him to come back and run the company, which Michael scoffs at until he sees how much the family means to his teenaged son George Michael. To keep the family together, Michael asks his self-centered twin sister Lindsay, her husband Tobias and their daughter Maeby to live together in the Bluth model home with him and George Michael.

Throughout the first season, different characters struggle to change their identities. Buster works to escape from his mother's control by bonding with brothers Michael and Gob as well as with love interest Lucille Austero, Lucille Bluth's neighbor and chief social rival. George Michael nurses a forbidden crush on his cousin Maeby, while continually trying to meet his father's expectations. Lindsay's husband Tobias searches for work as an actor, with the aid of Carl Weathers. Michael falls in love with his screw-up older brother Gob's neglected girlfriend Marta, and is torn between being with her and putting "family first". After seeing Michael physically fight with Gob, Marta realizes that they do not share the same family values and she leaves them both. To spite Buster, Lucille adopts a Korean son whom she calls "Annyong" after she mistakes the Korean word for "hello" as his name. Through an escalating series of dares, Gob marries a woman he just met, played by Will Arnett's then real-life wife Amy Poehler, but cannot get an annulment because he refuses to admit that he did not consummate the marriage. Kitty, George Sr.'s former assistant and mistress, tries to blackmail the company. She is caught in the Bluth family yacht's explosion, as used in one of Gob's magic acts, but survives with a cooler full of damning evidence labeled "H Maddas". After previous failed attempts, and a brief religious stint in Judaism, George Sr. finally escapes from prison by faking a heart attack. It is also revealed that George Sr. committed "light treason" by using the company to build mini-palaces for Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Because of his father's latest prison break deception (a faked heart attack), Michael decides to leave his family and move to Phoenix, Arizona with George Michael but discovers that he cannot leave the state due to the Bluth Company being under investigation and him having to go to jail as a replacement for his father. Lucille appoints Gob the new Bluth Company president, but since Gob proves utterly incompetent, the position's real duties revert to Michael. During the rest of the season Gob serves as figurehead president; Michael is still under scrutiny for George Sr.'s illegal activity.

George Sr. is not, in fact, gone. After faking his death in Mexico by paying off the cops, George Sr. returns to the family model home, where George Michael di…

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The show, while critically acclaimed, did not gain a sizable audience. According to the Nielsen ratings system, the show's first season was the 120th most popular show among households and the 88th among viewers aged 18 to 49, averaging 6.2 million viewers.

U.S. ratings in the second season averaged about six million viewers, while the third season averaged about four million viewers. Fox announced that it would halt the production of the second season at eighteen episodes—four episodes short of the planned season.

For the third season, Fox positioned the show on Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET. Ratings dropped further than previous seasons. On November 9, 2005, Fox announced that the show would not be airing in November sweeps, and that they had cut the episode order for the third season from 22 to 13. Fox ended up showing the last four episodes in a two-hour timeslot—directly opposite the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics. The series finale episode received 3.43 million viewers.
Throughout its original run, Arrested Development received critical acclaim. It is widely regarded as one of the defining shows of the 2000s and has been praised by many critics as one of the greatest comedies of all time. In 2007, the show was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-Time".

Tim Stack of Entertainment Weekly praised the series, saying "Is it beating a dead horse to once again state that this underappreciated gem is the best sitcom on TV? Too bad. Arrested Development is the best sitcom on TV!"

David Bianculli from the New York Daily News stated "If you're not watching this series on Fox, the least you can do is buy it on DVD. You'll love it, and it's such a dense show (in the best sense of the word) that it rewards repeated viewing. Like Scrubs and the British version of The Office, it is the sort of show that truly deserves to be seen uninterrupted, several episodes at a time, for maximum enjoyment. The laughs-per-minute quotient here is insanely high, making it great value as a home library purchase."

Alison Powell of The Guardian said "As Hollywood agents worry about the demise of the town's lowing cash cow, the multi-camera, staged sitcom, here to save the day is Arrested Development, a farce of such blazing wit and originality, that it must surely usher in a new era in comedy."

Gillian Flynn of Entertainment Weekly named Arrested Development the best television show of 2005 and said in her review that "As oddball as Arrested is, it's also humane. A flawless cast—from Will Arnett's breathy, bombastic Gob to Jessica Walter's boozy Lucille—grounds it, aided by Ron Howard's affable narration. The center of sensibility is good son Michael (Jason Bateman) and his even better son, George Michael (Michael Cera). Bateman and Cera give the best reacts around—the former all weary exasperation, the latter adorably bunny-stunned. Together, they're the sweetest, awkwardest straight men on the smartest, most shockingly funny series on TV ... which is likely canceled, despite six Emmy wins. It's a perversion not even the Bluths deserve." In 2012, Entertainment Weekly listed the show at No. 2 in the "25 Best Cult TV Shows …

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