Ever since "Arrested Development" was canceled in 2006, I have been living a lie. A part of me died that year when the show ended after a short third season. I would scream "COME ON!" to passers by and would get no reaction other than fear and loathing. People were forgetting about the most brilliant show to ever grace my television and I couldn't stand it. I (and every other online nerd) clung to the hope of an "Arrested Development" movie. We thought it would never happen in our lifetime. I'm even going to blame my cirrhosis on the show's cancellation. But I won't have to be sad for much longer: over the weekend, at the AD reunion panel at the New Yorker Fest, it was announced that the show is coming back for a short season and a movie. I'm so excited I can't even think of a good AD quote to end this paragraph with.
Hurwitz' [sic] hope is that the limited series would serve as a walk-up to his long-gestating movie. "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," he said at the festival, which was also attended by Development stars Bateman, De Rossi, and Cera, as well as David Cross, Will Arnett, Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter, Tony Hale, and Alia Shawkat. Ron Howard, one of the comedy's producers, even participated via speakerphone. :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."
Hurwitz then unveiled his very unconventional plan. "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.
"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." [EW]
If you actually read that entire thing, you'll pick this up: you see the words maybe, hopefully, possibly, and in the future a lot. So even though they announced that this is going to happen, it's possible for the film/television companies to put the kabosh on it. And if they do, I'm going to have to start making some molotov cocktails.
