ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT at TCA: Live-Blog

It’s finally happening — ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT is coming back in May with brand new episodes exclusively on Netflix.

The cast is doing a panel at the winter press tour, so keep refreshing for updates…

1:43: “It didn’t seem as impossible to me until we got into it,” creator Mitch Hurwitz said of reviving the show.

1:44: Hurwitz says “the show was always trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching.”

1:45: “One spoiler is out — David Cross and Tony Hale are no longer on the show,” Jason Bateman jokes of his absent-to-the-panel costars.

1:46: “We just went free-form. Jazz riffs,” Hurwitz said of the structure of the new installments. He said it happened “organically,” and “stories would intersect.” Hurwitz is now giving us fake HEMLOCK GROVE spoilers. But in all seriousness, he says we’ll see scenes from each character’s perspective in their episode, so we may learn new details of a scene two characters share in various episodes.

1:48: Bateman wants it to be clear that this isn’t season 4…the intention is to set up a movie, but even if the movie doesn’t happen, the story is contained.

1:49: Is there worry this could tarnish the legacy? “I could vomit right this moment,” Hurwitz said. “I could vomit on cue. So, yes.”

1:50: “We very early on decided to give the fans…something they felt was special,” Hurwitz said. The goal was to make it so they found the things funny…they didn’t want to be precious. Hurwitz praises the ability to keep the fans guessing. He said they always intended to have 14 episodes, but they allowed people to think there would be 10 so they got excited by more.

1:53: Hurwitz said they’ve embraced the idea of the Netflix episodes being like an album — if you watch them in order, you’ll get “the maximum number of surprises.” He’s also embracing that spoilers that might get out since all the episodes will be released the same day.

1:56: “The first day I came in was a day they were working on George Michael,” Michael Cera said of coming in to the writers room. He apparently got some jokes into the finished project.

1:58: Portia de Rossi said the first show she binge-watched was BREAKING BAD (over this past summer). She said she loved the control of being able to watch as much as she wanted. “It was great not to wait a week for an episode.”

2:00: Minor spoiler alert — de Rossi teased that there’s a scene where Lindsay misinterprets something Lucille said and then we’ll see the scene later from Lucille’s point of view.

2:01: “As far as Lucille goes, I’ve finally gotten to play Joan Crawford with laughs,” Jessica Walter said.

2:03: “Some of the storytelling will be in flux,” Hurwitz said. “In general, we’re going to try and keep these to under a half an hour.”

2:04: “I’ve never gone into a writers room,” Walter said, but she noted she had to come to this one because of how right they got these scripts. She called it “beyond anything I could hope.”

2:06: “Maybe the movie will end up there? Who knows?” Bateman said of the Netflix deal.

2:07: The second week of filming featured a scene of all nine of them together. “It was a pretty interesting room,” Jeffrey Tambor said.

“It was surreal, there we were nine years later, and except for the two kiddies who grew up…it was surreal,” Walter said.

2:09: “There’s plenty of the regular cast, but it is singular…it is Lindsay’s episode, it is GOB’s episode,” Bateman said.

2:10: They kept things low-key while filming and they all used tiny dressing rooms, except for the person whose episode it was. They joked (?) they’d all gather in that big trailer if there was something good on TV that night.

2:12: They showed us a cut Buster-Lucille clip from the new ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and while they may put it back in (so it’s silence for now), it is literally laugh-out-loud (and maybe cry a little bit from the laughter) hilarious.