On Sunday, May 26, Netflix will debut 15 new episodes of Arrested Development. I visited the set last fall, and my feature on the revival ran in the print TIME magazine a couple weeks ago. This week, I’m excerpting some interviews I did ...
On Sunday, May 26, Netflix will debut 15 new episodes of Arrested Development. I visited the set last fall, and my feature on the revival ran in the print TIME magazine a couple weeks ago. This week, I’m excerpting some interviews I did for the piece. Mitch Hurwitz, the show’s creator, writer, and all-around mad genius, discussed the revival with me on the phone a few weeks ago, while in post-production on the new season: So, are you editing episodes at this stage? Hurwitz: Yeah. The episodes have to be essentially locked in like 12 days and I still have like three hours of content which is like three movies. So it’s this crazy pace – it’s been kind of around the clock. But I’m getting there. I’m getting there. That actually brings up a question: are you locked into, you know, whatever – 22, 25, 30 minutes an episode? They can be different lengths, right? Exactly, and that’s been a big relief. The old show had to be something like 20 minutes and 45 seconds – something like that. It’s a crazy short amount of time so it really honed my skills at the concentration process. You just – distill and distill and distill the material, and I’d look at those old shows and think, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe we did that in 20 minutes.” Now the new show basically I’m looking at it as a whole and it’s probably gonna be about eight-and-a-half hours which is, I think, longer than the first season was altogether. One of the many things that was so great and distinctive about the old episodes was that you really crammed a lot in them; I imagine part of that was sort of a side benefit of the running time that commercials forced on you. And yet I imagine you want to retain that familiar piece and metabolism for the show. Yeah, my goal was actually to get the episodes as short as possible, and I just couldn’t do it. There was