Who is Maeby Funke in Arrested Development?

Show

Arrested Development

Played by

Alia Shawkat

First episode

“Pilot”Season 1, Episode 1, aired November 2, 2003

Role

Main cast

Network

FOX

Occupation

High school student and secret film executive

Show run

2003 to 2019Canceled by FOX in 2006, then revived by Netflix for seasons in 2013 and 2018 to 2019.

Also known as

Maeby Fünke, Maeby, Mae Funke, Surely Funke

Maeby Funke is the quick, sarcastic daughter of Lindsay Bluth Funke and Tobias Funke, and the cousin George Michael cannot stop thinking about. Played by Alia Shawkat, she spends most of the series trying to get her parents' attention and accidentally builds a career along the way.

On Arrested Development, Maeby Funke's story runs through George Michael Bluth (Cousin and Crush), Lindsay Bluth Funke (Mother), Tobias Funke (Father), Lucille Bluth (Grandmother), and Michael Bluth (Uncle).

Who is Maeby Funke?

Maeby is the only child of Lindsay and Tobias, who end up living in the cramped Bluth model home after their own finances fall apart. She arrives from a progressive school and quickly loses interest in public school, preferring to pour her energy into schemes. Her parents are so wrapped up in their own dramas that they routinely forget where she is or what she is doing.

That neglect is the key to Maeby. Many of her stunts are designed to provoke a reaction from Lindsay and Tobias, and when they fail to notice, she simply keeps going. Along the way she proves to be the most quietly capable member of the younger Bluth generation.

Personality and comedy

Maeby is deadpan, fast, and fearless, a teenager who can talk her way into or out of almost anything. One of her best-known cons is Surely, an invented twin sister with a made-up illness called "B.S.," whom she uses to collect sympathy and donations. At the film studio, she deflects anyone who says she looks too young for her job by shouting "Marry me!", a gag fans still quote.

Her relationship with George Michael is the other half of her story. She kisses him in the pilot purely to shock their parents, and the cousins spend years tiptoeing around a mutual attraction that the show plays for maximum awkwardness. Maeby is far less rattled by it than he is, which makes their scenes together even funnier.

Key storylines

In season two Maeby tags along while Tobias auditions for a movie, lies about her age, and talks her way into a job at the film's production company, then simply keeps it. She develops real projects and earns the respect of her boss, Mort Meyers, until season three, when George Michael throws her a surprise sixteenth birthday party and invites the studio executives in her address book, exposing how young she really is.

The original run ends with the discovery that Lindsay was adopted, so Maeby and George Michael are not related by blood, and Maeby pitches her family's story to Ron Howard as a possible series. In the Netflix revival she has stayed in high school for years, still waiting for her parents to notice, tries to cash in on George Michael's Fakeblock app until he fires her, and her season four story ends with her own arrest.

Behind the scenes and legacy

Alia Shawkat was the first actor cast in Arrested Development, and she auditioned together with Michael Cera. Creator Mitchell Hurwitz built the name Maeby out of the names of his daughters, Maisy and Phoebe, and the "cousin Maeby" pun on whether the two cousins are really related is part of the joke. Shawkat won a Young Artist Award in 2005 for the role.

Hurwitz first imagined Maeby as a conservative foil to her activist mother before reshaping her into a different kind of troublemaker. Making her bold and irreverent, the opposite of the meek and obedient George Michael, helped set up the cousins' doomed romance and gave the show one of its sharpest young characters.

Maeby Funke: frequently asked questions

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