May 22nd, 2013
Galley Friend M.F. sends along another well-crafted AD roadmap by a fellow at NPR who is both insanely awesome and has too much time on his hands. It’s great.
At this point, I raise a practical question: Is it possible that the Netflixed Arrested Development could be less than awesome? This interview with mastermind Mitch Hurwitz does not inspire a great deal of confidence:
We ended up with an eight-hour movie of Arrested Development where the pieces do kind of come together. Not only was the show told out of sequence, it was shot out of sequence. Half of the stuff is on green screen. There are scenes where there are two characters talking to each other. On one side, it’s Jason Bateman in July, and on the other side it’s Portia in November. It was these crazy, crazy things where everybody had to say, “Wait, she hasn’t gone to that party, so she wouldn’t have that makeup on, therefore . . . ”
I mean, it was just nonstop like that, and it still is. I just finished what’s called offline editing three days ago. We had to be locked at four a.m. two or three days ago. I think we locked at 3:59 AM. In the final moments I was still saying, “Wait! He doesn’t know about Buster! Let’s move that line!” It was insane. [Laughs] This is, to me, one of the craziest things of this. Again, it’s such a fortune that I get this opportunity, but this is an eight-hour show that has been tested in no way. No one has seen it. I haven’t watched it back to back. Everyone has seen pieces of them, and we’ve been delivering them out of order. There’s never been a screening of these back-to-back. I guess that’s usually the case with television, right? You pick the pilot and then the rest of them are an episode, one at a time. But those episodes are pretty heavily vetted.
Umm, yeah. My advice: Dramatically lower your expectations.
Exit Question: If the Netflixed AD is a disappointment (which wouldn’t really diminish my love for the series and Hurwitz), will the fan base (a) talk themselves into initially loving it (the way people did with The Phantom Menace) or (b) overreact and trash the entire AD project?
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If it does suck, which online media outlet is fist to run the headline “Mitch Hurwitz: Analrapist”? (I say Slate.)
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Oh, Ari beat me to it. We’ll just have to dissect it at Klimpie’s. Where you want your belt to buckle, not your chair.
Ari S. May 22, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Or will it be “Mitch Hurwitz: He’s made a huge mistake”?