"Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way..."

"...unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact with each other, convene at the family home for a slowly escalating mess made inevitable by their respective and collective dysfunctions, in which case that family is unhappy in the same way as the Karamazovs."

Arrested Development = The Brothers Karamazov, via blog-friend Helen's new blog at First Things.  What say you, Brent?

UPDATE: Obviously, Helen's cheating a little here by nipping the first line of Anna Karenina.  (Is she trying to make Tolstoy even angrier?)  More appropriately, this post would begin:

[Michael Bluth] was the [second] son of [George Bluth], a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his [arrest on multiple accounts of 'light treason], which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else.

Edits mine.