Mitchell Hurwitz
With 'Arrested Development,' we tried showing the deep disdain that connects a family. We wanted to hold up a mirror to American society. And, just as predicted, America looked away.
When I was on 'The Golden Girls,' we'd have eight scenes per show. And when 'Seinfeld' came along, they went to, like, 30 scenes a show, which was revolutionary. 'Arrested Development' has probably got 60 scenes per show. It just keeps emerging as this more and more complex thing. I always try to keep it very simple at its heart.
When we were making 'Arrested Development,' it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. You know, nobody was watching. We weren't getting feedback. The job wasn't paying very well. But the one thing I did feel confident about was: No one will ever be able to do this again. Because no one would be stupid enough to try.
Television is a very writer-driven business, and it's one of the few parts of entertainment where writers are treated with respect, only because they need you. If they didn't have to treat you with respect, they would be happy to dismiss you.
You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.
Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.
Shows don't reunite because television doesn't work that way. There's no profit model and people go off to do other work.
When you don't have a laugh track, you can make the clothes funny. We can make a sign funny. We can make the way somebody walks funny. The makeup can be funny.
What's realistic to me is that families love each other and stand by each other. What's unrealistic is that they would ever say that.
It's like, if I had the luxury of choice, and didn't have to worry about making a living, I would definitely want to get into whatever field it was that allowed me to push further and further comedically. Because that's the joy of it.
There's real peril in trying to repeat yourself, and apply rules that applied to something else to a new project.
It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.Collection: Thinking
The people that always impress me are the ones that are curious about what they're going to do next.Collection: People
Thanks to the critics and thanks to the Emmys, we got all sorts of great reviews and notices and awards, at the start. Part of it is that it's great fortune to have something to live up to, but as creative people, we all have to just put that aside and go forward, make the best product we can, have as joyous of an experience as we can, and really remember that the spirit of this was to surprise the fans with something that they didn't see coming.Collection: Awards
It's very hard, I think, for critics to write positive reviews, because there's not that much to say about something you like. You can kind of say 'I really like that band' and then if you're forced to fill up the rest of an article, you've got to start saying heady things. It's much easier to say negative things in a review.Collection: Writing
One of the best ways into the business is to get a job with a production, which you can do by cold-calling or by getting your résumé out there, and also through contacts. That's where nepotism really helps.Collection: Jobs
I think of there being two conditions that creative people go through. I think it's fear and curiosity.Collection: Thinking
I have this identity for myself as a writer and the only thing that can happen is that I chip away from it.Collection: Identity
I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.Collection: Growing Up
Chance favors the well prepared. The more stuff you throw in, the more chances you have of looking like, 'I did that.'Collection: Favors
Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.Collection: Regret
I think it's a big part of being a creative person.Collection: Thinking
We figured the interesting question for them is, "Where has the family been since 2006, since the last time we saw them?" So, part of the time, we had to spend answering that question. Then, inevitably, it goes up to a point of crisis, in everyone's show. There was just no getting around that it was about 2006-2012.Collection: Interesting
The form came out of the function because it is for the audience that already knows the show, while hoping to get a new audience, too.Collection: Form
First of all, there is absolutely an order that we have put together to create the maximum number of surprises, but that's just part of our storytelling.Collection: Order
We will be looking at things like the confluence of a scene, and we still have all these creative decisions to make. In general, we're going to just try to make these under a half-hour. We're going to try to take that kind of cable TV comedy model.Collection: Creative
We started writing the shows in order, and then very quickly had to jump to, "Oh, we got Tony Hale today and Jessica [Walter." We've got to jump ahead and write that stuff that's in Jessica's show. Fortunately, we knew the story, but it was challenging.Collection: Writing
One of the challenges of the show has always been trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching it. Now that people have started watching it, they get ahead of us. We've all started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.Collection: Fun
There was so much talk about the movie and we thought, "Wouldn't it be great to still do the movie, but to give everybody this thing they didn't see coming?" Even with the number of episodes, it was reported that there was going to be 10 episodes, and then there was talk about adding more.Collection: Numbers
I always feel funny when I don't reveal things, especially to you [the press], who have supported us so much and are really the big reason we're here. But, we hold back information about the plot because we want to reward the fans for sticking with us, and that's so much fun. That's the funnest part of it.Collection: Fun
I could vomit, right this moment. I literally could vomit on cue. Yes. Here's the truth of that. We didn't have a big audience, obviously, when we made the show. Very early on, we made a decision that we were going to try to give the fans and the people that were loyal to us something that they felt was special.Collection: People
We started gearing our content more to what makes us laugh and stories we wanted to tell, and we had to decide, early on, to not be precious about it.Collection: Laughing
There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle.Collection: Would Be
We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.Collection: Might
It's much easier to say negative things in a review.Collection: Negative
Even on the old show, we would maybe not all be in the scene. Sometimes there would be a penthouse scene and everyone would get together. But, even in that context, it would be because somebody was missing.Collection: Missing
I hope to take advantage of the Netflix organism and see if there are ways to get in new material and see if there are ways to do deleted scenes.Collection: Netflix
There are a lot of things that are in the show that harken back to the old show, but I really wanted to resist doing a greatest hits. It was irresistible to do a greatest hits, but it was almost too easy. There are things that I know are still ahead of us, in the future of whatever Arrested Development brings.Collection: Development
Violence has not really been an issue. Even in my wildest hopes, I wasn't trying to get violence in.Collection: Issues
I've never had a working relationship like I have with them. I developed a lot of the design of this show with them. That conversation was about, "What are your needs? What are you looking for? Will this work for you guys? Will a show work where you've got one episode per character?" They really were a creative partner.Collection: Character
People have outs for numbers of episodes, usually, written into their contract. Some studios will say, "We're going to let Julia Louis-Dreyfus off of Veep to do three episodes, but not three episodes of the same show." But, that's all business affairs, so I'm talking over my head here.Collection: Numbers
I don't know how that budget would have been worked out, but that was the initial idea. Obviously, we couldn't have had a show with nine expensive actors in it. It was very nice that they were even interested in doing that. But, I was so proud of what we'd done that I couldn't think of a compelling reason to do a lesser version of it.Collection: Nice
Well, at the time, you have to remember that we were not successful. The Showtime offer, as it was presented to me, was half the money for half the show. I was not interested, at that point, in doing a smaller cast and a more simplified Arrested Development.Collection: Successful
At the time, I used to say, "We should market this like Everybody Loves Raymond. It's just a guy dealing with his family." Instead, it was irresistible to show all these funny people. So, I actually think this could be more inviting to a new audience because they can just watch one character, find out what's going on in his life, and then meet another character and find out what's going on in her life, and then see how it intersects the other one.Collection: Character
I think it actually makes more sense for a new audience than the old show did because we're focusing on one character at a time. It's all conjecture why somebody didn't watch, but one of the theories was that there was just so much information, even in the trailers and promos, of all these different people.Collection: Character
There were a couple times when we started working out the stories - and I was doing this with Jim Vallely and our friend Dean Lorey, who was on the show originally - and we were working on a movie. There would be some fan fiction things that would scoop us. It happened a couple times, where I thought, "Well, we can't do that!"Collection: Couple
I think that timing is everything. At first, it was too soon. And then, the time was right, but I was busy with other things, and the cast was busy with other things. By the time we sat down to work on the movie, enough time had passed that suddenly a different story emerged.Collection: Thinking
If you've got a restaurant, you definitely want the line to be out the door the first night, but you're more interested in people continuing to come to the restaurant. And that's their outlook, a little bit. I think it allows for more creativity, in the process. It allows people to make interesting programming that maybe wouldn't have a place on broadcast networks, if you were just counting people.Collection: Creativity
Everybody keeps falling back to the same patterns without doing too much dramaturgy.Collection: Fall
I think everybody wants to be loved, all the time, but it's not realistic. It's also not realistic, if you're going to be ambitious, in terms of changing the form or evolving.Collection: Thinking