A second life on Netflix has become a mixed blessing for the creators of "Arrested Development" -- an unprecedented option with some unexpected burdens. Yes, Mitchell Hurwitz and company have had to contend with sky-high expectations that are all but impossible to meet as they've brought the show back after seven years off the air. But they're also now working in a medium stripped of many of the boundaries that originally shaped the series.

Netflix isn't network TV, a fact that goes beyond all 15 episodes going live at once. Installments don't need to keep to 22 minutes, or even be all that episodic; content restrictions are a thing of the past -- as are, if what was said about "House of Cards" continues to be the case here, notes from executives. Aside from dealing with the not-inconsiderable difficulties of scheduling the busy cast, Hurwitz was theoretically freed to make the purest version of "Arrested Development" he desired, and the result is an uneven, funny, ambitious, overlong and knotty tangle of individual storylines that form a whole that's darker and more brittle than expected. The Bluths are back, but time has not been kind.

The new episodes haven't gone over well with critics so far -- though having only been out for a few days, opinions seem worth sitting on for a little longer. As someone who came to the show after it was first canceled, I'll admit that it took some time to grow on me even in its friendlier Fox incarnation. And season four is not friendly, which may be the most difficult and most remarkable thing about it.

It's not that the 2013 version of the Bluths are unrecognizable. "Arrested Development" is nothing if not consistent to its own mythology, which may include stair cars and Motherboy competitions, but is just as involved, intricate and layered as that of a sprawling sci-fi saga, with jokes set up for and called back over years. But, unleashed to pursue their individual destinies with the oblivious self-centeredness and without the edict to be "likable" that the show used to mock in its third-season moments of metacommentary, the Bluths are no longer lovably awful but mostly just awful. Cornball moments, little or otherwise, have pretty much been cleared out.

The new season finds the Bluths and the Fünkes literally whoring each other out for cash, guilting each other into buying homes they can't afford in the midst of a community of sex offenders, sleeping with underage boys and sending addicts crashing back into drug use while cheerfully ignoring their pleas for help. And while the first three seasons made occasional gestures toward timeliness, as when George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) was tricked into building houses in Iraq, in season four the Bluths are more linked into farcical takes on current events.