Arrested Development Creator Wants Season 5 and Bluth Movie on Netflix

Mitch Hurwitz says he'll never go back to working for a network

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At a New York TV Festival keynote conversation on Monday night, Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz said that season four of the series—released on Netflix in June—was always meant to be a preface for an eventual Bluth family film.

At this point, nothing is official. But Hurwitz is determined to make it happen — but with Netflix, not a studio, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“What my new thing is, because it might be tough to get the cast together for the four months you would need to make a series, is to try to get them together for four weeks sooner, and do the movie…And then, bring the series back after that…So my goal is to do a movie for Netflix type thing, and then go into the series.”

Hurwitz acknowledged that Netflix’s model of releasing all of a series’ episodes at once changes the storytelling strategy. And he apologized to the AD audience for not warning them about last season’s style change.

“I felt in many ways, I did not prepare the audience for this,” he said. “Right before the show came out, I thought, I’ve really not said what this is, and what it had become was a novel…People are going to get to watch eight hours of this, they’re not gonna spend the next six months [having the show] doled out to them. That first episode became much more like chapter one of a novel than episode one of a series. And I didn’t prep you guys — I’m really sorry about that.”

Arrested Development

Sam Urdank / Netflix

But he went on to applaud Netflix original shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black for their innovation: “They’re shows that fundamentally change, whereas television has always been about fundamentally staying the same, that episode 600 of Two and a Half Men is basically like episode four.

And after receiving what he saw as creativity-damping notes from networks he said he would “absolutely not” go back to working for a network again. He once received a note while working on Running Wilde with Will Arnett for Fox that said, “Mitch, if you think something is a good idea or it’s just a twist you haven’t seen before or it just feels special or fresh, just don’t do it.”

[Hollywood Reporter]