When Arrested Development returns this Sunday, resurrected after a six-year hiatus, the format of the show will look very different than it did in 2006. Yes, all your favorite Bluths will be back, and creator Mitch Hurwitz will still be at the helm, but rather than a network premiere, all 15 episodes of the fourth season will drop at the same time on the streaming service Netflix, allowing fans to consume as much or as little of the season as they want, when they want. The episodes all take place concurrently, with each one catching up on the life on a particular character since the Season 3 finale. Wired talked with Hurwitz about how bringing the Bluths to Netflix allowed him to do things that never would have been possible on network TV, and why he believes the format could change the way that shows get made.

Wired: When you finally said, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to make the show,” did you always have this sort of structure for the episodes in mind?

Mitch Hurwitz: No, it definitely evolved. What motivated the show was that I had too much information for the Arrested Development movie that I had been working on, and it occurred to me that if I do five or 10 minutes per character on where they are now at the start of the movie, we'll be 90 minutes of the movie and nobody has had a conversation yet. And so that’s when I wondered if there was some way to turn them into little webisodes or some kind of form that the movie would be predicated on.

Wired: Once you decided to go to Netflix, did that actually change how you thought about structuring it?

Mitch Hurwitz I was very excited about the idea of really trying to reinvent the form for myself. Not as a global kind of reinvention–just to try to do something really different storytelling wise. I like not having a formula for the show. In the first season we started doing call-forwards, hiding things that would be revealed later. In the second season we did twists on twists and more call-forwards. And for the third season, I had this idea of doing long arcs where every line had to have four levels. It had to mean something to Michael; it had to mean something [about Charlize Theron being] a spy; it had to mean she was developmentally disabled, and it had to get laughs. So it was really, really hard. And almost for nothing. I mean, you’re not going to find out until the very end. At the time we thought, oh, nobody is going really to go back and watch and say, “Oh, I see what she meant by 'I don’t understand complicated.'" This season it’s a further extension of that kind of experimenting, because the viewer is completely in control of where they want to go. On television was basically like publishing a short story in the Saturday evening post every week. This is more like a novel where you presume the reader is interested enough they’ll go back and reread a section and go, “Oh that’s what that’s about, I see.”

Wired: One of the things about binge watching is if people might be less thoughtful about each episode because they’re just gobbling it up. Aand I’m curious about the novel analogy, because it almost reminds me Charles Dickens. At one point, he wrote a chapter every week, but no one would ever say that’s the best way to create a novel.

Mitch Hurwitz: I think of it more like writing a mini-series than something [for] binge watching… I think that people do sit down and watch it all at once. Personally, I think [that] will be very fatiguing and will lose some of the fun of being able to mull on it. But I think that with the majority of binge watchers, it’s a modified binge watching, just like the majority of novel readers. You know, you don’t read it all at once. But you are in control of when you feel like going back to it… I personally hope people don’t sit and watch it for, you know, 500 minutes or longer.

Wired: It seems like Netflix is in a position to do things that couldn’t be done on a regular network.

Mitch Hurwitz: I would say that in its purest form, a new medium requires a new format. You can’t do in a short story what you could do for a novel, in a novel. You can’t do in a haiku what you would do in a long-form poem. In a perfect world, we would be making something that could be only on Netflix, just like in years prior, you could make something that could only be on HBO. Prior to that you’d be thinking of something that’d be, “Oh maybe on Fox,” because they were the risky network.

Wired: Do you feel like there are things in it that couldn’t have happened if it were on a network? Does it look significantly different than it would have if it had ended up on Showtime?

Image: Netflix

Mitch Hurwitz: I don’t know completely the answer, but I think this is a very ambitious show in its storytelling. And unfortunately for me, it is the kind of ambition where the grand difficulty doesn’t really reveal itself to the viewer. It was the same with the Charlize Theron thing. I remember thinking, “No one’s going to know how hard this was." We’re doing an ambitious thing that might not even look that ambitious to an audience, but boy was it hard. Shooting out of sequence, knowing we couldn’t get the actors at any given time to be together that we needed to be together so every week [someone] mysteriously disappears from the show. And the only thing that the audience can really presume is, “This must be when he did that Broadway play.” We’re like, “Where did he go?”

Wired: Six years isn't that long, but it’s also still kind of a long time. Will and Grace ended six years ago. Nobody wants to revive Will and Grace. Do you have some sense of what made this show so sticky?

Mitch Hurwitz: First of all, I didn’t expect any of it. And I’m surprised and I’m grateful and I’m really gratified because it was a lot of hard work that really felt like it was falling on deaf ears. Even all that work I was talking about in the Charlize Theron episodes, Fox burned off all five of them together on the opening night of the Olympics–the most watched Olympics in history. It’s just like, “Oh god, all this work.” So it just makes me so happy that people find it and enjoy it. I remember at the time thinking, what didn’t work about it on broadcast television, or at least what Fox was that it was so dense. And my response to that always was, it will be rewatchable because of that... I always thought this would make it something that people want to see more than once. It goes so fast that when you see it again–even when I see it again–I think, “Oh, I forgot about that.”

Wired: Did the fact that so many people originally found the show on DVD and then eventually on streaming video make you more comfortable with being on Netflix, and also with the way the show is going to be released as a full season?

Mitch Hurwitz: Yeah, I think it creates a different set of requirements for me. I want the people who have been so supportive of Arrested Development to be happy, and I know–or I presume– that what they’ve liked is the details, [so that] has put a lot of pressure on me to fill in the detail even when I don’t have time to do it, because that’s how I used to watch The Simpsons when that started. I would be so disappointed if a book on the shelf didn’t have a funny title. It’s kind of a like a sickness, you know? A character will be named Rob or something and I’ll just think, “We're going to call him Rob? He doesn’t even have a funny name? What’s the point? We can’t just give the guy a name?” I struggle with that stuff. Everything has got to have some meaning. And that may not be necessarily what the audience connects to about the show. It really might just be the characters. It might just be these wonderful actors and the way they play the characters. I remember when, when Seinfeld really took off and the plot started getting really intertwined, I remember thinking, “Oh, you don’t have to do that for me, Larry. I just like watching them talk. It ‘s not a priority for me that the car that was loaned to George is the same car that backed in the piñata that Kramer liked. I’m OK without that.”

Wired: Is that also why the shoot ended up going longer than you had initially expected?

Mitch Hurwitz: No, no. We always expected it to go long. I was just trying to keep it as a surprise for the fans, as was Netflix. The story that came out was, hey, they had too much material sdo they went long. In fact, we had this idea: Let’s say we’re doing 10 episodes and then we’ll surprise everybody and say, “Oh we’re actually doing 14!” And then everybody will be happy… No, we always knew. [Editor's note: The season is now 15 episodes long.]

Wired: I know you’re still working on Arrested Development, but are there other projects that might just be fun to do in the streaming format?

Mitch Hurwitz: Oh, absolutely. Oh my god, yes. For this one I definitely had certain parameters because people expect certain things from Arrested Development, but there’s no question, I think it’s a whole new world, if there’s a way to make it financially viable for creative people… British shows have always been great because for whatever reason they don’t need to make a 100 [episodes]. They have got a financial system where you know, you can make six, you can make 13. How many Fawlty Towers were there? 12 or 13, and that’s it. And it’s great. And maybe if they’d done 110, Fawlty Towers wouldn’t be a beloved, perfect show; a lot of shows won’t be great at 100 [episodes], and it’s always been considered a failure if a show doesn’t get to 100 because that’s the only way the studio can make the money back. The studio is putting up half the cash typically for every episode. The network gets reimbursed immediately by advertisers, but for studios it’s an investment and they’ve got to get these numbers big enough so they can sell the whole thing and then get a windfall and pay for all the other failures, which is part of the process. So, if Netflix or a streaming enterprise can say, “Hey, we’ll cover the production costs and you’ll own the DVD rights when it comes off of Netflix,” all of a sudden, a lot of smaller shows and Downton Abbeys can be made. It suddenly unleashes a lot of creativity from a lot of people who just don’t happen to have a style that appeals to 400 million people.

Wired: At this point would you consider making the Arrested Development movie somewhere else?

Mitch Hurwitz: I do have a story to tell after the movie too… What we wouldn’t necessarily want to do is use the segmented approach that we had to take on here... I think it really works for this because you are catching up with the characters, but going forward, I think you really want to see them all together. I think that’s an important part of it. So, it would have to be when everybody is on board, everybody carves it out every two years to do [it]. No matter what else we’re doing, we know that from this month to this month, we’re all going to get together and make some Arrested Development. I’d love that. I don’t know if anybody else would, including the audience, but I would love that.