On set with the cast of Arrested Development.
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In 2011, Sarandos, in charge of developing original shows for Netflix, pitched Ron Howard, who narrates the show and produces it with Imagine Entertainment, on reviving the revival. Howard and Hurwitz had tried for years to make an Arrested Development movie. But as Hurwitz plotted out the film, he found that simply catching up with each character would take up most of the running time. One more season could do that, at length, and serve as a calling card to sell the movie to studios. (In a bit of wishful thinking, Howard and his Imagine partner Brian Grazer play themselves in the new season, as producers making a movie based on the Bluths.)
"Mitch felt that Arrested Development has always been a bit of an experiment at heart," says Howard. "It was about taking chances. And there was something consistent with that in trying this Netflix model." Making the show outside traditional TV would give Hurwitz more creative freedom than ever. He certainly had plenty of material by now--he had never really let the Bluths out of his mind. Co-star Will Arnett, who made two post-Arrested sitcoms with Hurwitz (the animated Sit Down, Shut Up and the short-lived Running Wilde), remembers, "There was this Arrested Development document on Mitch's computer. We'd be talking about ideas for Running Wilde, and Mitch would say, 'You know, that would be a great line for Michael [Bluth].' And he'd open that document. It was always there."
Like house of cards, the new season of Arrested Development will be released online all at once. This had a practical benefit for production. A network sitcom has to shoot episodes in order, to keep the pipeline of weekly installments flowing. "If you're doing The Office, at any moment you can say, 'O.K., now we're doing John Krasinski's scene,' because you have him under contract," says Hurwitz. "We didn't have that opportunity."
Last fall, for instance, Arnett (playboy-magician son G.O.B. Bluth) was making Up All Night for NBC. Hale (nervous mama's boy Buster) was making HBO's Veep. Jeffrey Tambor (who plays both criminal real estate patriarch George Bluth and his hippie brother Oscar) and Portia de Rossi (self-absorbed adopted daughter Lindsay Bluth-Fünke) had pilots pending at NBC. So Hurwitz (who co-directed every episode of the new season with Troy Miller) shot scenes like jigsaw pieces, depending on who was available. Hurwitz recalls, "Some days our call sheet would say Episode 406, 408, 409, 412 and 401."
Bateman, whose straight-arrow, white-sheep-of-the-family Michael Bluth appears in every new episode, worked out a front-loaded schedule to shoot all his scenes before leaving in late October to direct his first movie. He says it's a testament to the show that the cast members, who had moved on to bigger things, each wanted to return anyway. "We had all managed to carve out careers for ourselves," he says, "so it wasn't like, 'Oh God, I hope it comes back so we can work again.' Doing Mitch's material and being together with all of them was the only real reason." (As Howard puts it dryly, "Nobody's making their greatest paycheck doing this round of Arrested Development.") It's Bateman's last night of shooting, and as he walks back to the set from a dinner break, he sounds a little wistful. "If the movie doesn't come together," he says, "this may be the last night I ever play this character."