"Arrested Development" Creator Explains How Herman Cain Inspired Season 4—and Cain Responds

Mother Jones

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The new season of Arrested Development has a sharp political edge that should feel familiar to fans of the show. The series’ original three-season run on Fox, which aired between 2003 and 2006, contained some of the richest TV satire of the Iraq War and Bush years (bad WMD intel, “Mission Accomplished,” “preemptive strike,” Abu Ghraib, CIA dysfunction, war protests, and so on). The fourth season, which debuted on Netflix in late May, depicts the infamous Bluth family in the context of a new political era, one defined by the American housing crisis, economic collapse, and out-of-control drone warfare. But of all the political elements of this long-awaited season, arguably the most important—or at least most visible—real-world inspiration for this new batch of episodes is Herman Cain, the one-time 2012 GOP presidential front-runner and former pizza baron.

One of the fourth season’s central story arcs involves an illicit sexual relationship between Lindsay Bluth Fünke (played by Portia de Rossi) and Herbert Love (played by Arrested newcomer Terry Crews), a charismatic, philandering California Republican congressional candidate explicitly modeled after Cain. Both are black, bespectacled, and intensely conservative and anti-Obama, and Love’s “low-high” economic prescription sounds an awful lot like Cain’s widely blasted 9-9-9 tax plan. (Furthermore, both men use Krista Branch’s song “I Am America” in their campaigns, and Love’s campaign manager looks, acts, and smokes like Cain’s 2012 chief of staff Mark Block.)

Cain is well aware of this satirical, comic rendering of his 2012 “Cain Train“—he just couldn’t care less about it. “I heard about it, haven’t seen it, and I’m unfazed by it,” Cain said in a statement sent to Mother Jones. “In the vernacular of my grandfather, ‘I does not care.'”

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"Arrested Development" Creator Explains How Herman Cain Inspired Season 4—and Cain Responds

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