Arrested Development returning for a limited series run to set up a movie

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

After what seems like an eternity of teases related to the return and continuation of Mitchell Hurwitz’s short-lived but beloved “Arrested Development” in movie form, it now appears that we may be getting that as well as 9-10 television episodes as part of a limited series run.

EW reports that Hurwitz – after making the announcement himself along with the entire “Arrested” cast yesterday at the New Yorker Festival – wants to shoot 9-10 episodes that would air next fall and catch audiences up on the characters’ lives since the series ended in 2006. The hope is to have the limited season serve as set-up for the eventual movie. Here’s what Hurwitz had to say from Sunday’s festival:

“We’re basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes with almost one character per episode, where like the first episode will just be Buster. We’re kinda picturing it like, um, well the latest joke we have is that, you know, it’s Cambridge, Massachusetts and there’s all these scientists in lab coats and they’re waiting for somebody and Buster comes through the door wearing a lab quote and says ‘let’s begin,’ and they say, ‘you don’t get to wear the lab coat, we’re experimenting on you.’ And then we go through his life and we meet the people in his life and maybe he goes to see his therapist who he’s getting a good rate on because it’s Tobias and he’s lost his license. We can do cross overs and things like that. But it’s an unusual style of show I think and we get him to a certain point of peril in his life and then maybe we jump over to like Maeby and she’s living with Cornel West… We’ll do this kind of thing that builds the peril in their lives until they all come together, really, in the first scene of the movie. It requires, and Ron [Howard] has been working on this too, it just requires studios to work together, they don’t normal work together in film and TV. It’s a really ambitious project but it’s also a very simple project in a way because it kind of gives the fans a level of detail for ‘granularity,’ which is a big word on the East Coast.

“I really have to say, we’ve talked about this, we’re all game, we hated being coy, we’ve been trying to put together this more ambitious idea and I think we’re very close, the script is halfway done and we have to get the film companies on board. They’ve always been great to us but you know times are tough and money is tight but I’m very hopeful, there is business left to be done but creatively we have a very specific plan of how it would come out and what we would do and when we would shoot it. Our hope is that, perhaps the series is in the fall.”

“Arrested Development” producers are confirmed to be in talks with Showtime and Netflix about bringing the limited series to the small screen. Should Netflix land the deal, it would be a major boon for the home video juggernaut which has been on the receiving end of some very bad press of late. Meanwhile there’s Showtime, home of premium cable hits like “Dexter”, “Weeds”, and Californication”, which back in 2006 was reportedly in talks to save the Fox series. That, of course, never happened. But five years later, they may get the chance to help give the Bluths new life after all.