The fourth season of “Arrested Development” may have been the biggest television news story of the year.
After years of waiting for the cast to reunite for a movie, we actually got 15 new episodes on Netflix, albeit in a slightly altered format. “Arrested Development” fans should also be excited about the launch of a new soundtrack including songs like “Balls in the Air” and “Boomerang.” The soundtrack launched with a live performance by composer David Schwartz, his daughter Lucy (singer on “Balls” and “Boomerang” among others) and the band.
Schwartz himself assured me that the theme to “William Hung’s Hung Jury” would be on the soundtrack. Hurwitz was kind enough to remember me from our many TCA sessions and we caught up on the show’s music, and his latest comments about plans for a movie and future Netflix seasons.
CraveOnline: If iTunes downloads had been a thing during the first three seasons of “Arrested Development,” would that have been enough to keep you on Fox?
Mitch Hurwitz: You know, I don’t have that data. I think in general, any show that was canceled several years ago is automatically better than any show today. I think we were canceled with seven million viewers. We were getting big numbers, right? The real secret was back then Nielsen wasn’t counting for college campuses where I think we had really caught on. It was really the year after we got canceled that that started being factored in.
Music became a model with shows like “Glee.” “Smash” maybe didn’t work, but now music downloads are a big component.
Right, and I remember being aware of “Well, we want this to go out on DVD” so we were putting a lot of detail in, but in a funny way I think the detail is the thing that really made it successful in those later markets, and perhaps kept it from being successful on broadcast TV. It really was a show meant to be watched by paying attention to it as opposed to just having it on in the background and watching on a computer screen or watching on an iPad. We didn’t have it yet.
Last I read, you were thinking you would like to do a movie before a fifth season, but the movie could be for Netflix. Is that a slightly different plan than when you thought you’d do a studio movie?
Yes, really the thing I’m always quick to say is it’s not up to me. I’m game for anything. In a perfect world, we will bring this back as a series we revisit, but because realistically cast schedules are probably hard to make, I keep saying let’s do a quick movie because we know we can get everybody for four weeks. It’s getting people for five months that’s challenging. My plan really has been just find a way to do a stopgap for the show, some kind of film on Netflix or whatever if anybody else is interested, and then bring back the series to Netflix. But, a lot of people get to make this decision.
Sure, but is this still the same movie script you’ve been planning for years?
Yes, that’s really what it came from. We really did write this to go into a movie. It was such a delight doing that on Netflix and our audience is there. Even if it was to have a window in a theater, which would still be thrilling, it ultimately wouldn’t be able to be as appreciated the way it would be on Netflix where people can watch it as they want and go back and pick up the details. So I’m game for anything but I don’t want to make any promises until we have something.
We understand. That’s how we’ve been covering it.
I finally explained it the other day to Dan Snierson, who’s been a friend for a long time. He’s like, “But do you think it’ll be a movie?” I said, “Think of it as if I made a pilot and you were asking me will it be on Thursday night?” I would very much like it to be on Thursday night, but it’s got to get picked up. I really do feel like this season on Netflix opened the door in a lot of ways. I think everybody realized this is viable, we can do this. It’s not a pie in the sky dream, so I’m super optimistic.
Right, you thought the fourth season and a movie would be it, so is a fifth season brand new territory for you to think about?
I feel like it kind of is. We were looking at this saying, “Maybe we just do our own thing.” Jason Bateman for years always said, “Let’s do 7 Up and 21 Up, whatever they got up to. Let’s just do that. Maybe not every seven years.” I like the idea of finding a way, and I think suddenly the technology emerged through Netflix where you don’t have a fall season, where maybe it is possible to say, “Okay, let’s remain a family and keep doing these and keep exploring the characters as they get older.”
But you do seem to want to do it more often than it took for the fourth season.
Yeah, we opened the door to this now and I think also it’s incumbent on us to keep pushing and keep pressure on it to make it happen.
I was surprised to read you felt you didn’t feel like you fully prepared audiences for how different the fourth season would be. Now, I feel like I was at a lot of press events where you were very thorough explaining how different it was.
Okay, good. I think what I meant was I think I had accepted in a very fundamental way that this was an exercise in storytelling for Netflix that was because we, at this point, had found out we were going to be aired all at once. It was like okay, now the challenge is, given we don’t have the characters together as much, that it’s one story.
We had reached a point in the culture, and it happens every year, where people got really into, ‘Oh, the first ‘Breaking Bad’ is not good. Oh, ‘Mad Men’’s not good this season.” Then at the end of the season, they’re saying, ‘Oh, we loved ‘Mad Men’ this year. We loved ‘Breaking Bad’ this year.” That’s because those showrunners and filmmakers had said, “No, we’re going to tell a story and when you tell a story that isn’t wrapped up in 20 minutes, you’re going to be doing more setup to get to the end.”
The old shows, if you look at “I Love Lucy,” the first half, set up the problem. The second half, she’s shoving candy in her mouth. So when you go with that on a bigger scale, the first three episodes you’re setting it all up. The last three episodes you’re shoving candy in your mouth. I just remember early on thinking I may not have made it clear that this is just one story. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I did.
Is it weird that I didn’t find it that different? Because I didn’t feel a need for everybody to be in every episode or interacting all the time.
I do think it makes a difference if you had watched them after their initial run. If you’d watched them in a binge way in any way, you were up for the challenge of “Okay, this is one thing. I get it. That’s what they do on ‘Arrested.’ They’re setting up things that they’re going to pay off not at the end of the episode but in other episodes.”
When you have a full dialogue scene going on under narration, how does the script look? How do you indicate what the actors are saying and what Ron Howard is saying?
The scripts are super long. Also, this particular last series, a lot of the narration was written in post because I was still making fundamental choices about what to reveal when. So really, in post-production I would realize, “You know what? I was saving thing thing as a surprise for episode eight. Let’s put it in episode four and save this other piece for episode eight.” So there was a lot of quick adding things to it. Unfortunately, as much as it was a leisurely process, we were still doing it on a television schedule so you’ve got 12 hours on a mix stage to tell the story. It’s locked. It’s still television. It’s still challenging.
I’m really looking for somebody to talk to. Can you recommend a good analrapist?
I know a very bad one, but I’m a big believer in the analrapy arts. I’ll tell you, we spent a lot of time hiding ANUSTART. We spent a lot of time hiding that. I was very worried. We’d cover it up on the set because that was our analrapist joke. If that goes, we’ve got nothing.
