OLIVIA MARNE
At the Netflix panel over at NAB 2012 in Vegas, the cast of “Arrested Development” reunited to promote the upcoming ‘return’ of the show (it will air on Netflix).
Creator Mitch Hurwitz also let slip that the entire cast won’t feature in every episode of the returning show, if only because a lot of them are busy with other projects and couldn’t commit to that much.
“Because everybody is on separate shows, we had this idea to do kind of an anthology series and meet the characters, where they have been, one at a time,” Hurwitz told attendees, according to THR. “That is evolving into the old show again, even though the concept is slightly different.”
Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Portia de Rossi and Michael Cera are all reprising their roles for the new Netflix series, which will be available to view on the internet in the first half of next year.
Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos explained how the reunion came about.
“The seeds for a Netflix reunion came from a simple party conversation with Ron Howard, that let to a meeting with Brian Grazer, which led to a meeting with Mitch Hurwitz, which led to a meeting with Gary Newman at Fox,” he said. “It was clear that everybody wanted to come back; we just need to figure out how to make it work with everyone’s incredibly busy schedules. We decided not to follow the conventional definition of a season; we would produce exactly how many episodes were needed to tell the story.”
