Before we get to Arrested Development, can we talk about Golden Girls? I love that you wrote Golden Girls – Bea Arthur and Betty White are just the best.

Well, Betty and Bea weren't necessarily the best of friends, you know. Bea was tough on the outside and so tender on the inside, whereas Betty was tough on the inside and so sweet on the outside. I just loved Bea.

The writing on Golden Girls still feels so sharp and modern

I take very little credit for all that, I was just lucky enough to be 24 and given a job on that show.

It's incredible watching Golden Girls now, as there is so much on that show you couldn't ever get on TV today, such as older women having sex – and talking about it

Absolutely. And I remember when Sex and the City started happening; I was like: "This is just the Golden Girls!" The characters would talk about sex and people would be so scandalised and I was like: "We did this! We talked about orgasms on NBC on Saturday night with older women." I don't think you could get a show with older women on TV today.

The Pier Pressure episode of Arrested Development: everyone's favourite episode – now. Photograph: 20th Century Fox

Why is that?

Well, I think they used to develop a lot of shows for TV that they didn't think would work, and I think Golden Girls was one of those – "Oh, we'll put it on Saturday night and bury it there." But also, television is in this crazy place where it's still trying to get this 12m audience but it doesn't exist. Golden Girls had 30m. We were cancelled when we had 8m. Now people have 4m and they're a hit. So it gets smaller and smaller and now there are streaming places such as Netflix and the marketplace has fragmented. I watched a little of Breaking Bad when it was broadcast and a lot streamed, and you do lose something ... It was really interesting with Arrested. We put the new series out at midnight so it was on at 3am on the east coast. I was trying to say: "Hey, don't watch this all at once, it's just an 8½-hour thing." But the New York Times reviewer really started us off on the wrong foot and created the impression that we got bad reviews when he wrote: "I watched six episodes. The shows are too slow, too long." I was like: "Yeah, it's 3am, you're watching until 9am, you're pissed off, it's memorial weekend, you don't get to have brunch with your family – I get it."

The reaction was a reversal of what you got for the first three episodes, in that the critics seemed wary whereas the public was a lot more enthusiastic

You know, I'd been putting so much effort into working the storylines out and which episodes would have which themes, over a period of four months. But at the end of the editing process I suddenly realised, oh, people are just going to binge-watch these shows – I don't know if we're doing the right delivery system. So when the shows went up, the first thing I read was Twitter and Twitter is self-selecting, in that if people are writing directly to me and using the hashtag, then they're probably being positive. Then we got a couple of those not so good reviews. You have to ask: "So what is the point? Do you try to get all good reviews? Get 30 million people to watch it?" And when someone asked me about the bad reviews I said: "I know some reviewers didn't like it but you know who liked it? People who loved it." You want enough people to like it so that you can keep making more, but it's like publishing in that you don't necessarily write a novel and hope that it gets kids, adults, grandparents – everybody. You just say: "I hope this finds people who appreciate it."

It felt like a series for the fans

I was aware that you can't be indifferent to your audience. I remember talking to Chris Guest once and he said: "I don't really care about my audience, I just do my comedy." And I thought "Well, I guess that's what an artist would say." Did John Lennon care when Sgt Pepper came out? He knew he wasn't doing another I Wanna Hold Your Hand. But I think he did care. Especially with comedy, if you wanna get a laugh, you have to care about your audience. So the first job for me was thinking about the people who had so taken to the show. And I think a lot of them were disappointed because they had a different expectation of what the show was going to be. Even when I did the original series, with every episode audiences would say, "Oh they ruined the show." I remember when we did the episode Pier Pressure, people hated it. Now it's everyone's favourite episode. People complained when there was more action, they hated Annyong, they hated Pier Pressure – every episode was like that. Then this new audience came along and they didn't differentiate between the episodes, they just looked at it all as Arrested and loved it.

The Banana Stand – there's always money in it. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Everett/Rex Features

Now that the tone of Arrested Development's first three series has influenced so many shows, such as Community and 30 Rock, did you feel pressure to be revolutionary with the fourth series?

I always felt internal pressure to not repeat myself and it became really difficult to run a TV show that way because that's not how TV works. Even writing for the Golden Girls I remember my first episode was when Betty became the smart one – that was new. I remember somebody once said: "Your style is made from what you can't do," and I think I felt like: "Well I can't write jokes as well as these Golden Girls writers, so my stories will be more intricate or I'll find twists," and that has kind of remained my style even though I developed as a joke writer. Even in the second episode of Arrested I decided to burn down the Banana Stand because I was like, I don't want there to be any standing sets because people will then expect there to be certain standing sets. And Ron Howard said: "You might want to rebuild the Banana Stand."

Well, there's always money in the Banana Stand

It turned out there was always money in the Banana Stand.

Was that also slightly Freudian, in that you wanted to burn down the Chip Yard [the cookie business that Hurwitz and his brother started up as teenagers that bears noted similarities to the Banana Stand]?

Definitely. It's so funny to hear you say Chip Yard! Oh God, I used to pray that the Chip Yard would burn down. I was 13 and my brother was 15 and we had this little family business and it was just like Arrested in a way because no one then was just selling cookies, especially in a beach community where it was all ice-cream and popcorn. I remember people screaming at me: "You can't do that! I'm going to burn your fucking Chip Yard to the ground!" People were so angry. My father pushed us to do the Chip Yard to show us how hard it is to make a buck, but it wasn't difficult with the Chip Yard as it immediately started making money. So he was like: "This money is going into a college fund." So we didn't get any money and we worked around the clock – I still have burns on my arms. So I really liked this idea of some kid sweating in a stand while kids outside are laughing on the beach.

Speaking of working within constraints, you had to work with each actor separately as their schedules were so packed. In an ideal world, how would you have preferred to do the fourth series?

I actually would have preferred to do the movie. What happened was, by the time I sat down to do the movie, a lot of years had passed and I had a lot of story and so I sat down with Ron Howard. But we could barely get anyone to let us do this movie, it was very hard to get anyone interested in it. The prevailing belief was, the show was cancelled, why would you do a movie? But I had this anecdotal evidence that people were watching the show, but it was totally anecdotal – and of course I'd think people were watching the show.

Even Ron Howard couldn't get someone to greenlight a movie?

You'd think, but that's the movie business. So we sat down and he said: "OK, what are you thinking?" And I said: "It needs to be a trilogy." And he put his head in his hands and said: "I don't think they'll do that. How about if you make the first one and then we'll see." And I said: "But people then will be disappointed, I want them to know we'll resolve the story so I want it to be a trilogy." And he said, "It's not going to happen." So I went back to work and it became clear that even if I just spent a little time with each character, there wouldn't be time in a single movie ... So the idea that emerged was this anthology show, one character at a time, completely separate, just little webisodes. Then from there, I started being more ambitious and it became about how they all affect each other. Every problem that arises in the lives of the Bluths was started by another Bluth. It's completely self-generated. There's no exterior incident – everything is their fault.

Meanwhile, you were making Running Wilde with Will Arnett

That was one of the craziest TV stories of all time; it's like something out of a show parodying TV. You start with a premise and pitch it and it just kept getting changed and changed. So it was going to be about a rich guy in Los Angeles who had a little bit of entitlement and he had to deal with that. And it became about a guy with a castle – in New York City! – who has a littler girl who's the narrator. It went through eight different drafts before it even got picked up. But for some reason I got it into my head that I wanted to teach Will Arnett a lesson. I love Will, he is like my younger brother.

Witty and mean: Jessica Walter (left) as Lucille Bluth. Photograph: 20thC.Fox/Everett/Rex Features

He's your hermano

Yes. He's my hermano! So when he said: "Let's just give up," I'd be like: "No. We're going to keep trying. We're going to rewrite it with a totally different premise." And he'd be like: "No, fuck them." I said: "No – not fuck them!" That was my lesson to him: you have to work hard in life. Will Arnett – he's never run a Chip Yard this boy – I have to teach him. Then we got to eight drafts before they said yes, then they wanted us to move the show to New York, so we rewrote it again. Then it got to the point where Fox were second-guessing me on every turn and I was taking every note but they were just all traumatised by working with me on Arrested, which I never thought was such a trauma for them but everyone at Fox was like: "Oh no, Mitch is difficult." Then it got to the sixth episode and the studio president said to me: "Just don't do whatever you think is a good idea." I said: "You're kidding me." He said: "I want you to be successful so just do the opposite of whatever you want to do." Having said all that, Will is funny in that show and I like to write for Will to be as funny as possible. Arguably he could be more successful playing more of a normal character.

I don't think so, I prefer it when he plays weird. His episodes in the fourth series are my favourite episodes.

I know, I know. He is so gifted and he can go small or big and everyone else who uses him says: "Just make him go big." But he is so good at falling apart – Gob's defence mechanisms are paper thin.

Lucille Bluth always reminds me a bit of Bea Arthur in Golden Girls, with a bit of Rue McClanahan thrown in from time to time.

Oh, that's funny! Lucille started out with a lot of my wife's mother in that character, who was much more genteel and more delicate [than Lucille], seemingly harmless. She'd say when she visited my wife's sister in college: "You now weigh more than the president of the US!" She's witty and mean. Then Jessica gets hold of those lines and bites into them with those Jewish rhythms of hers. So it's written passive aggressively and she does it aggressive.

Are you ever going to have her do a Play Misty For Me homage?

I can't believe we haven't done that yet! Thank you. You just got a storyline credit! You know, since we went off air everyone got so crazy with meta – Community, 30 Rock. So I said: "OK, no meta. We have to be careful with this because we're going to want to make every line of this meta, with references to George Michael and Superbad. So no meta." But … we might have to break the no meta rule for Play Misty, that is so great.

One of the biggest surprises of the fourth series is how the heart of the show moves from Michael to George Michael. George Michael is the moral compass

As fanciful as the show gets, I always try to start with, OK, what's the truth of their situation? So the most interesting storyline for me is the one who grew up, who was the most overshadowed and pure, and so it sounds cynical but I wanted to see him become a Bluth. So I said: "OK, let's see him get steamrolled into lying and his father assuming that they'll have the same relationship they had when George Michael was younger and what's that like?" That seemed to be the heart of it. Also, the conceit of the fourth series is what I think is true about all families: everybody thinks they're the normal one.

Tony Hale as Buster. Photograph: 20th Century Fox

Were you worried about making Michael so screwy in this show?

No, and maybe I should have been. But it was definitely a choice to take him out of the centre. So many times we've seen Michael leave the family and he's pulled back in.

Like in The Godfather

Exactly. But with this one I really wanted it to be with him being through with the family and he completely self-destructs. But he's going to have to come back for Buster, the most innocent member of the family, who's now charged with murder.

Does the fourth series look how you want it to?

It does. I'm super happy with it. But like anyone, I get buffered by the ups and downs with the press's reaction and I go to that a little too much because I'm a solicitous person and I want people to laugh. But in my heart of hearts, I'm really, really happy with it, for the dumbest reasons, like seeing George Michael in one episode talking about his software company with great ease, then in another episode you realise it wasn't with great ease, that was him starting to lie. I love stuff like that! I love experimenting with storylines, going from it being simple to all cause and effect. It was a crossword puzzle of a show and it was the hardest thing I've ever done.

So are you doing a movie now?

I hope so.

But you can't leave Buster hanging.

Oh, there's definitely more story.

So it will be on TV or Netflix?

Yeah, and I've got it all mapped out – well, about 8%.