Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: arrested development, jason bateman, michael cera, mitch hurwitz

It's Alive! Arrested Development Will Return For One More Season

Buried at the bottom of some Monday night rushes not so long ago was the announcement that the cast of Arrested Development would be in attendance at the New Yorker Festival on October 2nd, ostensibly to talk a bit about the upcoming movie release. But according to a tweet on the NYF feed yesterday, the stars are going to return to the small screen one more time before the movie is made.

Series creator Mitch Hurwitz explained that the series would have a short run of about 9-10 episodes, and that each episode would be dedicated to a different character. Since it has been five years since the end of season 3, the episodes are apparently going to explain what the hell everyone's been getting up to for the last five years (and knowing those guys, it's probably an awful lot).

We don't completely own the property, there are business people involved and studios and that kind of thing. Just creatively, 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. In fact, where everyone's been for five years became a big part of the story. So in working on the screenplay, I found even if I just gave five minutes per character to that back story, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together. We're trying to do a limited-run series into the movie … We're basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes, with almost one character per episode.

Episode one will be dedicated to Buster Bluth, and while the final season is still in the very early prep stages Hurwitz has already thought up at least one joke for the episode.

The latest joke we have … is that it's Cambridge, Mass., and there's all these scientists in lab coats and they're waiting for somebody. Buster comes through the door in a white lab coat – 'Let's begin' – and they say, 'Oh, no, you don't get to wear the lab coat. We're experimenting on you.'

At this stage nothing is fixed, but as a rough guide to when you'll get to see the series it seems as though they are hoping to start filming next summer, according to Jason Bateman. Since some of the cast members, Bateman included, have gone on to star in much bigger movie roles it might take some time to get them all back together in one place. If you've been following the story of the AD movie you might remember Hurwitz indicating that it would never happen because Michael Cera was refusing to come back now that he was all big and famous. Yeah, turns out that was a joke that "turned really ugly".

I kind of was perpetuating a little thing, like, wouldn't it be funny if Michael Cera was the holdout. Let's put that out there. And Michael had that Andy Kaufman thing. And then it really turned ugly, quickly. So I really just have to say, for those of you that have been following this saga, Michael's always been great.

All credit to the NY Times for the quotes, I tried to get Brendon to send me to New York so I could report on the festival myself, but he spent our entire budget on an enormous cardboard cutout of the Edvard Munch painting The Scream so that he could stick it in his living room window and use it to terrify passing children. I'd complain, but to me it seems like money well-spent.

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