Now, I've seen a lot of crackpot 'let's save Arrested Development' ideas around these parts, but this one strikes me as one of the most drastic yet (not to mention arbitrary and baseless). You want to essentially "morph" Michael and Lindsay into one character? Why? Do you think the Bluth family is too crowded? The show needs pruning? Streamlining?

My main problems with your fix are:
1. I don't see how it relates to any 'problem areas' the show might have
2. It's such a fundamental change, you might as well be pitching an entirely different sitcom (And said sitcom might not necessarily be a bad one, but it sure as shit wouldn't be AD)

You want to cannibalize the most essential character of the show. You say he needs a 'reason'. Well, with a show like AD I'm not so sure this is even true, but let's assume you're right. I think Michael's 'reason' works just as well as any of the other characters', if not ten times better. He probably needs them more than they need him, because of his obsession to turn things around for the Bluth family and atone for the sins of his father. Everybody else is nuts, but they're more or less content with that being the status quo. Michael has taken it upon himself to change all that. Which I think makes him a pretty unique protagonist. Usually, the heroes are defending the status quo, and it's all the wacky secondary characters shaking things up. Yes, Michael's wacky family may mess up his plans at every turn, but those plans are antagonistic in nature. He wants to incite change, and they won't let him. So it's a bit of a role reversal there.

At his core, Michael Bluth is a man trying to fix something that is beyond repair, and that never worked all that well to begin with.

That's his flaw. That's his greed. It's like some Greek tragedy where the protagonist takes all these measures to avoid his fate, and ends up walking right into his own prophecy. Take the cabin gag from last week. Michael was hell bent on spending some quality father/son time at the family cabin, but the whole thing kept getting screwed up. At least when *his* father screwed things up, he had a good excuse. He was banging chicks half his age. Another quasi-Oedipal overtone you have is the George/Michael clash. These two patriachal figures having some bizarre tug of war over the fate of the family business. I think you'd lose a lot of that by casting a female lead.

Michael is no more the straight-man than the mental ward patient who walks around in a labcoat thinking he's the doctor is a sane man. Sure, he may not be running around thinking he's Peter Pan or Napoleon, but at least those guys are having a good time. Michael burdens himself with some sort of moral code that nobody else lives by, and an illusion of control that he obviously doesn't have. He's the biggest nutcase of them all.

That's why his "relationships with them are all over the place" as you put it. They're dysfunctional. That's kind of *the joke*.


(So much for my knack for putting things into capsule.)