There Is No Fourth Season Of Arrested Development

The internet has been going a little bit insane for the supposed season four of Arrested Development, which is being released through Netflix in one big chunk in May, ahead of the AD movie. But when the internet goes a little bit insane, information gets a little bit misconstrued.

Here are some snippets from Jason Bateman’s cover interview for GQ, where he clears up a couple of things.

1. The 14 new episodes of Arrested Development aren’t, in fact, season four:

“It is not season four. It got misbranded or mislabeled way, way, way back when, and was never corrected for one reason or another. There are different agendas at work there, but it is not season four.”

2. In fact, the 14 new episodes are part of the movie:

“Every time [Mike Hurwitz, the show’s creator] went to start a movie script, there was so much work to be done just to fill the audience in on where the family had been since the end of the show, and to also initiate the uninitiated about who these characters are. So he thought: The only way to tell a story of this size is to do the first act in episodes. So it’s really a hybrid distribution of one big story. The episodes are simply act 1, and the movie will have act 2 and act 3 in it. So one does not work without the other.”

3. In fact, the 14 new episodes are the beginning part of the movie:

“There are many, many questions that these episodes ask that only the movie will answer. And there are many stories where the loop is closed inside the episodes. But the overall story, the bigger story – once you see the movie you will see that, “oh, this story started with those fourteen episodes,” because the action in these fourteen episodes happens simultaneously.”

4. Each character has their own episode, and you can watch them in whatever order you want:

“There’s a Michael episode, a Gob episode, a Lindsay episode, a Maeby episode. And the action across the episodes is happening simultaneously. If I’m driving down the street in my episode and Gob’s going down the sidewalk on his Segway, you could stop my episode, go into his episode, and follow him and see where he’s going.”

“There will be an order that is suggested, but because part of the fun of what [Hurwitz] does is so dense and multilayered—I mean, if you could see the writers’ room before we started shooting, the cards and literally the strings of yarn, different colored characters where plotlines and index cards are matched to this one – and then there’s an entire other room that is the movie. It looks like A Beautiful Mind.”

5. The movie was always going to happen:

“The last line of the last episode of Arrested Development was Ron Howard saying to Maeby—she’s pitching him a show about her family at Imagine—and he says to her, ‘No, I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie!’ And then the screen goes black. That’s it. So Mitch [Hurwitz, the show’s creator] was always planning on writing a movie.”

Bonus Fact: Jason Bateman swears a lot when talking about his wife, Amanda Anka.

“She’s fucking great. You will not get her to fucking shut up. Jesus Christ, does she like to talk. It’s really nice, ’cause I don’t have to say shit. I’m not that chatty. You might be surprised to hear, but I actually don’t like to talk, even though I haven’t stopped talking, but when I’m at social dinners or whatever, I’m usually the guy just sitting there just listening, ’cause she does all the talking. In fact, I situate myself at the dinner table, not next to her but across from her, so I can watch her fucking shoot that thing off. Just take ’em all down. Bring some gauze for your ears. She’s the best.”

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Here are more of those suave photos from the GQ cover shoot, by Peggy Sirota; read the full article here.