Way back in 2006, when Fox canceled Arrested Development, the press reported that Showtime had made an offer to continue the show but that creator Mitch Hurwitz has turned it down. Now, talking yesterday at Netflix’s presentation for television critics, Hurwitz shed some light on why he said no:
Well, at the time, you have to remember that we were not successful. The Showtime offer, as it was presented to me, was half the money for half the show. I was not interested, at that point, in doing a smaller cast and a more simplified Arrested Development. I felt like I would lose the one thing we had, which was the devotion of the fans. It seemed like there was a Showtime offer and Mitch said no. In fact, it was, “Would you do a version of the show with less budget and less everything else?†And it just didn’t make sense, at the time… Obviously, we couldn’t have had a show with nine expensive actors in it. It was very nice that they were even interested in doing that. But, I was so proud of what we’d done that I couldn’t think of a compelling reason to do a lesser version of it.
So, there you have it. Hurwitz turned the offer down because they wanted to reduce the cast, which definitely seems like a good move, even though it would have continued the show right after it ended its Fox run. Seems strange that he’s changing his tune now, what with this new run of Netflix episodes not featuring the whole cast in each episode, but hey, I’ll take more episodes of this show any way we can get them.