Asked during an audience Q&A session at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal whether Arrested Development will be coming back, the creator of the best television series (fictional or otherwise) about life in Orange County answered, “Definitely.”
Mitch Hurwitz, who bounced between divorced parents in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach as a child, then reportedly engaged in some gentle negotiations with a Netflix boss onstage alongside him and considered out loud whether the next project should be a film or a series–indicating both will come, he's just not sure in which order.
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Chortle has the report that includes Hurwitz turning to Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, saying, “I don't want to get into a whole negotiation right now … but I've got a family to feed.” The brilliantly twisted writer-director then added: “I keep thinking about it, and why don't we do the movie version of this and then do the series, because this series kinda peaks with the story?”
Hurwitz is then reported to have aired his internal struggle of going “back and forth between that and a series. But here's the most important thing, whatever we do, I want to get the cast all together and not do another anthology thing, and that's why I keep thinking about kicking off with a special or a three-part show and then going into a series.”
Next came the moment that should warm the cockles of any Arrested Development fan who possesses cockles.
“Are you game for that?” Hurwitz asked Sarandos.
“Absolutely,” the Netflix boss replied. “In any form.”
Which means not only life for Arrested Development but perhaps John Beard's To Catch a Local Predator and The Real Asian Prison Housewives of the Orange County White Collar Prison System.
On a related note, I just this past weekend got to Hurwitz's A.D.4-promoting interview with Terry Gross on the Fresh Air podcast. I had no idea he was the 13-year-old who, along with his 15-year-old brother Michael (now a local surgeon) were the kids who launched the hugely successful chocolate chip cookie business The Chipyard in 1976. I still vividly picture the Los Angeles Times story on the boys because it was around the same time Famous Amos hit it big.
Experiences with The Chipyard, whose profits paid for Michael's medical school and Mitchell's early-struggle period in Hollywood, no doubt informed George Michael's at the Bluth's Original Frozen Banana stand on Balboa Island, the series creator conceded to Gross.
Strange but true: The Chipyard opened on the Balboa Peninsula right next to Banana Rolla Rama, a banana stand opened in 1963 by Bob Teller of Orange County Marketplace fame. That's the same year George Bluth Sr. is said to have put up his banana stand.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.