Once you know about this pattern, you’ll see it everywhere.
Mitchell Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, has said in many interviews that he created the Bluth siblings based on the classic archetype of "matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown."
"At one point I remember learning that there was this classic archetype of matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown," Hurwitz explained on a recent episode of Julie Klausner's podcast How Was Your Week. "I just thought it was the coolest thing, and started seeing it everywhere there were successful quartets."
20th Century Fox
Hurwitz explained the meaning of the archetypes in terms of the characters on The Golden Girls, a show he wrote for early in his career.
"Rose is the matriarch because she has the maternal instinct, and Dorothy is the patriarch," Hurwitz says. "I think the clown is Blanche, because of all her sexual sort of clowning, and the craftsman, the serious one who sees things as they are, is Sophia." These archetypes come from Commedia dell'arte, a form of theater based on a wider range of stock characters and narrative tropes that originated in Italy in the 16th century.
Touchstone
You can see the same pattern in many other stories focused on a central quartet. Sex and the City has pretty much the same dynamic as Golden Girls.
HBO
And so does Girls, though the more sexual character Jessa plays the role of the craftsman, and the naïf, Shoshanna, is played as the clown.
HBO
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