Arrested Development out of exile
‘A 700-minute movie’ of episodes will be posted online on Netflix
PASADENA, Calif. — First of all, the fourth and final season of Arrested Development is not, strictly speaking, a season. It’s 15 self-contained episodes that can be seen together, in sequence, or one at a time, out of sequence and at random.
Not a season. Fifteen episodes. Or, in the words of Arrested Development’s original visionary, creator and head writer Mitch Hurwitz, “a 700-minute movie.” Got that? Good.
Second, Arrested Development may have originated as a critically acclaimed, Emmy Awardwinning TV comedy about a dysfunctional family of financiers in the wake of the Enron scandal, but the new episodes won’t, strictly speaking, be on TV. At least, not yet.
Starting Sunday, May 26 at 3:01 a.m. ET, the new episodes will be posted online, all at once, on the streaming service Netflix. The episodes will be available to Netflix subscribers in the U.S., UK, Ireland, Brazil, Latin America, most countries in Scandinavia and, yes, Canada.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the new episodes do not mean the oft-rumoured, much-talked-about Arrested Development movie is dead. The idea is still very much alive — if, at this moment in time, an idea only.
Hurwitz, who said he has always tried to make the show surprising, decided to tell the remaining stories free-form, “kind of jazz riffs.”In a meeting with out-of-town reporters, Hurwitz admitted that Development’s strange journey — cancelled in 2006, after three seasons and 53 low-rated episodes that alienated just as many viewers as it captivated, only to be resurrected six years later — has taken him into uncharted waters.
Arrested Development has always had fervent fans. It’s just that there aren’t that many of them. In hindsight, Netflix may be the ideal place for it.