Arrested Development fans are counting down the days (only 45 to go!) until its 15-episode fourth season premieres on Netflix, and last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jason Bateman went into detail about how the new episodes will differ from those that aired during the cult classic sitcom’s initial 2003-06 run on Fox.
On Kimmel to promote his new film Disconnect, Bateman told the host, “I want people to manage their expectations. They are great episodes, but what they are not are episodes like it was when it was on that other network [Fox].”
Bateman went on to explain that the narrative writer/creator Mitchell Hurwitz conceived for the planned Arrested Development movie was too expansive, so he broke the plot of film’s first act into the episodes that will air on Netflix.
“We were supposed to do a movie, and we still very well might. But every time the showrunner tried to put this big story that he wants to do in this movie in a movie script, which can only be like 110 pages, it got too big. So what he thought was, I’ll put the first act of this three-act story in these episodes,” Bateman explained. “So each character gets their own episode and all the action happens at the same time, so it can only really work on Netflix, where these episodes are released on the same day. So like, you can stop my episode if you see Gob [Will Arnett] run by on his Segway, you can stop mine, click over into his, watch where he’s going because all the action happens at the same time ’cause it’s all just act one. And in the movie it’s going to be act 2 and act 3, so it’s like a hybrid package.”
Kimmel joked that he might need Bateman to “sit with me” to understand the new episodes, which will be available in full on Netflix beginning May 26. “Yeah,” the actor quipped, “the country is not really going to put out a lot of work that day.”
Watch Bateman talk Arrested Development, as well as the slightly disturbing method he uses to cry on camera, below.
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