‘Arrested Development’ Returns on Netflix

And there was Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of “Arrested,“ toying with the boundaries of television comedy through self-referential humor, cutaway gags and setups to jokes that sometimes only made sense a season later. For Mr. Hurwitz, he said, “the joy of it became the detail.”

But viewers didn’t have the tools to play along. So all of the in-jokes that he and his colleagues delighted in, all of the recurring lines about making a “huge mistake,” the foreshadowing about Buster’s real father and the references to an Aztec Tomb, well, they were about as inside as jokes can be. In fact, they may have turned Fox viewers off — or at least discouraged new ones from giving it a chance. “Arrested” was canceled in 2006 after three seasons.

Yet much like the jokes that took time to play out, “all that effort paid off years later,” Mr. Hurwitz said in an interview, as viewers with DVD box sets or Netflix accounts pored over the episodes and appreciated the mentions of hop-ons, never-nudes and banana stands. In retrospect, his show was made for Netflix streaming before Netflix started to stream.

Now “Arrested Development” has met its moment. And its medium.

Birthed and buried by Fox almost a decade ago, belatedly discovered by new viewers through DVDs and Web streams and beloved by a fan base that most other shows only wish for, “Arrested” will start its second life on Sunday as a Netflix original series, available to subscribers of the streaming video service at 3:01 a.m. Eastern time. All 15 of the new episodes about the dysfunctional Bluth family will be released at the same time, allowing the most loyal fans to watch — and pause and rewind and rewatch and screen-grab and tweet and recontextualize — until the sun comes up and sets again.

When the show was on Fox, some of this was impossible, and none of it was easy. “We were right on the cusp of a sea change in how people watched television,” said Michael Cera, who plays George Michael Bluth and who returned for the Netflix revival along with the rest of the original cast.

Television consumption has become more personal since America first met the Bluths. Seeing characters on a tablet or smartphone screen makes it that way, and so does having the ability to pause, rewind and rewatch at one’s leisure. Yet television has also become much more public. People who identify as “Arrested Development” fans can connect with thousands of others just like them on- and offline. Case in point: the hundreds of fans in their 20s and 30s who patiently lined up in Midtown Manhattan this month at a replica of the show’s famous frozen banana stand. When BTIG Research interviewed 427 of them, 86 percent said they subscribed to Netflix, and half of the others said they probably would sign up to watch the show.

Sounding a lot like Jason Bateman’s character, Michael Bluth, Mr. Hurwitz said the groundswell of attention had spooked him a bit. “Hey everybody,” he joked, “let’s not make a superbig deal out of this.”

Too late. “Arrested Development” is poised to outperform Netflix’s first original series of the year, “House of Cards,” which was released the same way in February. “Arrested” is a known quantity, something that Hollywood (and many viewers) tend to gravitate to. The producers make it sound like a purer strain of the Fox show, with even more metacomedy and an even higher total of jokes-per-minute. As with the Fox iteration, the callbacks (the comedy equivalent of a flashback) and call-forwards won’t all be apparent at first, Mr. Hurwitz said, “but if anybody gets past Episode 3, they’re everywhere.”

If? Some viewers will be well past that episode by 6 in the morning on Sunday. Netflix will not release television-like ratings for any of their original shows, but the “Arrested” actors say they feel the audience now is both bigger and more committed than it ever was in the 2000s. (On Fox the series drew nearly eight million viewers when it started, but lost more than half by the time it ended.)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/business/media/arrested-development-returns-on-netflix.html?partner=rss&emc=rss