Mitch Hurwitz: New Arrested Development will be murder mystery - and could start shooting next year
The cult comedy's creator tells RadioTimes.com that the new project will have a "huge stakes" story, and reveals just how hard it was to keep season 4 on track...
It’s looking like the final countdown may have started on the next Arrested Development project; with creator Mitch Hurwitz telling RadioTimes.com that the murder mystery story could shoot “next summer”, if conditions are right.
Earlier this week, Hurwitz told Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival that Arrested Development will “definitely” return – although he was unsure what form it would take. “Here’s the distinction: what I should have said is ‘I definitely want to do more,’” he exclusively told RadioTimes.com. “And I definitely will, somehow. I said it to Ted Sarandos [Netflix chief content editor] and said, ‘will you do it?’ He said. ‘definitely’.”
“So, now we just have to get the actors together… I think they will. And most importantly we have to get Fox to say we can do it as they own the rights. So yes, we will do something. There’s definitely more story to tell… What I don’t know is if it’ll be this winter or next summer. My guess is it’ll be next summer we’ll shoot something, but that’s only with everything working great.”
After a seven year hiatus, Arrested Development returned to screens earlier this year via streaming service Netflix. Series four of the sitcom, which departs from the show's format by focusing on individual members of the dysfunctional Bluth family, end on a cliff-hanger in which Buster is arrested for murder. Whilst undecided on whether the continuation of the story would be a new series or the long-awaited film, Hurwitz said that he was more keen on the latter due to the logistical problems of getting the cast together for the Netflix series.
“I’m now back [to the idea of] a movie – even if it’s just a Netflix movie. Because I betcha I can get the whole cast for three or four weeks whereas to do a TV series I need them for five months. And I wouldn’t want to do another series with a segmented cast. That made sense to with this [Netflix] anthology series because the characters had split apart but the design was that they all came back together.”
The proposed film would, according to Hurwitz, be a whodunit? murder mystery revolving around a court case, with “huge stakes.”
“That’s what the series was intended to build up to,” he explains. “The family has fallen apart and Michael has finally said ‘I’m done’ and alienated himself from the family. And he has to come back. His brother is being arrested for murder; it’s not like he can say ‘screw mum, to hell with dad’.
When asked whether Hurwitz can get the cast back for a film, he said:
"I think the challenge will be logistics, but it can’t be harder than what I just had to do with the Netflix series, which was just five months of, like, suddenly finding out HBO won’t let us use Tony Hale and then having to re-write all his stuff… the whole thing was just insane… It was constantly a feeling of ‘is just any of this going to work?’ It was constant anxiety. Of me just going ‘does this make any sense?’”
