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Jessica Walter had a career before Arrested Development, but the Mitch Hurwitz series gave the last decades of her life a flair of cult-comedy stardom. As Lucille Bluth, constantly maligned wife to a criminal, Walter became an icon for a whole generation that wasn’t familiar with her work on Play Misty for Me, The Flamingo Kid, or even The Group.
The moment that makes Lucille indelible is one that’s used constantly on the internet: Her suspicious, slit-eyed glare as she closes the door in her son Gob’s (Will Arnett) face because he came over, looking a little lonely, and asked if she wanted to hang out. It’s obscene that a parent would respond to this scenario the way Lucille does, which includes not just the door slam but also a paranoid question: “Why are you trying to get me out of the house?”
There are so many moments from Arrested Development that Walter simply slays, and in remembering her, the internet is going to dredge up all of them. They all reveal her character’s flaws: She’s shallow, clueless about money, a terrible driver, probably an alcoholic, and above all, a shitty mother. “You’re my third least favorite child,” she hisses at Michael (Jason Bateman) in season one. She constantly belittles Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) about her weight, smothers Buster (Tony Hale) into protracted adolescence, and “doesn’t care for Gob,” when she stops and thinks about it.
Motherhood is a cult of demanding sacrifice that never measures up, but Lucille doesn’t even try to play the game. It’s awful—tragic!—and such a release too, to see the perfectly polished Walter ignore or manipulate her children to serve her own needs. Can you imagine Lucille changing diapers? Breastfeeding? Wiping spit-up off of a baby’s mouth? Never! Darling, you pay people for all of that. Nothing gets in the way of cocktail hour at the club.
As the product of a difficult mother who is now a mother myself, I’m too familiar with how fraught those feelings are, both as the child and as the parent. What I love about Lucille is how she transmutes the angst into comedy; with her every gesture, she makes the concept of bad mothers something we can all cope with, and maybe even laugh at. It’s often pointed out that even when antiheroes swept television, no female character could survive the scrutiny of being a crappy mom. Except for Lucille, who sucked on broadcast television, and everyone loved her for it. There’s guilt wrapped around every decision that goes into being a mom, and yet here’s Lucille, shame-free, sipping a martini poolside. How effortlessly she flips the script.
Walter played another wonderful mom role after Arrested Development: voicing Malory Archer on the animated show Archer, the similarly disappointing mom of H. Jon Benjamin’s Sterling Archer. But Adam Reed’s vision included the irritating seed of affection that Arrested Development always dispensed with. Despite being selfish, manipulative, and drunk, Malory loved Sterling. She mostly showed it by being repressed and awful, of course. But Walter made the most of her voice performance, refracting “shrill” into a dozen different tones, playing the instrument of her irritable, Waspy voice like a virtuoso.
Archer made several references to Arrested Development throughout its run—in the first season, Jeffrey Tambor played a role as Malory’s ex-lover—and in a way, it gave Lucille a venue to express her love for her children. There’s one wild episode of Archer where Sterling gets a chip implanted in his brain that makes him regress and become violent. Impulsively, he goes to Malory to either express his rage, or get some comfort. “Grill me a cheese, mother!” he demands, inanely. We never see Malory back down against Sterling, or anyone: She always gets what she wants. But in this moment of his desperate need, she caves; this woman who likely never uses her kitchen finds a frying pan and a spatula to make her son a grilled cheese.
I hope it doesn’t sound like a diminishment of her talent to suggest that Walter’s legacy lies in framing motherhood for the generation that first got to know her as Lucille. If anything, manipulating our expectations around the maternal instinct is virtuoso work, a comedic catharsis that feels cleansing. In that character’s grace notes, you can read Lucille’s whole journey—a privileged woman who nonetheless was forced into the gendered strictures of an unforgiving high society. But none of that really mattered, because she made you laugh. In the same way that Lucille was childishly, foolishly delighted by every disguise used by Gene Parmesan (Martin Mull), we were enchanted by her.
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