Over the last four or five years I've started to look at Arrested Development in the same way I look at Ghostbusters 3. It's great if it happens, but until it does everybody should shut the f**k up about it. It was a great series, which despite it's low ratings survived for three seasons and reached cult status. With many of the show's stars, in particular Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, going on to greater things it's only made people more desirous to see the show continue in some way. Almost immediately talk of a movie cropped up, and the wackadoodle rumors started flying.
Every few months or so one of the show's stars would get cornered and asked if anything was going on, and we'd get all sorts of lip service: "Yeah it's happening once our schedules line up", "Mitch is working on a script"...yadda yadda yadda. In August we learned what may be the actual plot of the film, but that's yet to be confirmed. Very little tangible movement has taken place. Until now that is.
Entertainment Weekly has confirmed that the show's producers have entered talks with Showtime and Netflix about a 9-10 episode mini series, which would serve as a possible lead-in to the movie, updating us on the various wacky members of the Bluth clan.
While attending the New Yorker Festival yesterday, which saw the cast of the show reunited, creator Mitchell Hurwitz revealed that the series would air next fall, produced by 20th Century Fox. If all goes off without a hitch, the film would shoot next summer for a possible 2013 release. That's not much different than what we've heard before, so let's focus on the TV part of things. Here's what Hurwitz told the audience...
Hurwitz: , “I have been working on the screenplay for a long time and found that as time went by there was so much more to the story. In fact, where everyone’s been for five years became a big part of the story. So, in working on the screenplay I found that even if I just gave five minutes per character to that backstory, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together. And that kinda gave birth to this thing we’ve not been pursuing for a while and we’re kinda going public with a little bit. We’re trying to do kind of limited run series into the movie.”
Sounds good so far, but something like this would be a massive undertaking. Not all that different than what Ron Howard was planning with his cancelled Dark Tower project...
Hurwitz: “We’re basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes with almost one character per episode, where like the first episode will just be Buster. We’re kinda picturing it like, um, well the latest joke we have is that, you know, it’s Cambridge, Massachusetts and there’s all these scientists in lab coats and they’re waiting for somebody and Buster comes through the door wearing a lab quote and says `let’s begin,’ and they say, `you don’t get to wear the lab coat, we’re experimenting on you. [garbled] And then we go through his life and we meet the people in his life and maybe he goes to see his therapist who he’s getting a good rate on because it’s Tobias and he’s lost his license. We can do cross overs and things like that. But it’s an unusual style of show I think and we get him to a certain point of peril in his life and then maybe we jump over to like Maeby and she’s living with Cornel West … We’ll do this kind of thing that builds the peril in their lives until they all come together, really, in the first scene of the movie. It requires, and Ron [Howard] has been working on this too, it just requires studios to work together, they don’t normal work together in film and TV. It’s a really ambitious project but it’s also a very simple project in a way because it kind of gives the fans a level of detail for `granularity,’ which is a big word on the East Coast."
Hurwitz: “I really have to say, we’ve talked about this, we’re all game, we hated be coy, we’ve been trying to put together this more ambitious idea and I think we’re very close, the script is halfway done and we have to get the film companies on board,” Hurwitz continued. “They’ve always been great to us but you know times are tough and money is tight but I’m very hopeful , there is business left to be done but creatively we have a very specific plan of how it would come out and what we would do and when we would shoot it. Our hope is that, perhaps the series is in the fall.”
Ok, so maybe now it's time to start getting excited. At least at the prospect of another season, and the increased likelihood of the movie. There's no money backing it yet, but if the series proves to be a hit there's no reason why Fox wouldn't toss a few coins Hurwitz and Howard's way.
