From left: Jeffrey Tambor, Amanda Peet and David Walton talked up their new NBC comedy "Bent" at the event, held at the New York Hilton.
Stephen Lovekin/Getty ImagesWhile in town to peddle his midseason NBC comedy Bent, Jeffrey Tambor dished on the newly resurrected Arrested Development.
“I know they’re planning nine (episodes) for Netflix as a prequel to the movie,” he told The Hollywood Reporter following the session for his Amanda Peet comedy, adding that all of the show’s original cast would be returning with him.
The series, starring Tambor as George Bluth, the patriarch of a dysfunctional family that included actors Jason Bateman, Portia De Rossi, Will Arnett and Michael Cera, ran for three seasons on Fox. A low-rating critical darling, its last original episodes aired in February 2006. In the years since, rumors about a movie have been many.
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At a cast reunion during November’s New Yorker Festival, creator Mitch Hurwitz teased the possibility of reviving the series, which ran on Fox from 2003-06, with a nine- to 10-episode “miniseason” leading up to an Arrested film. 20th TV declined comment at the time, but Bateman Tweeted the following day that the cast would do “10 episodes and the movie. Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early ’13.”
Netflix made the announcement official later that month, revealing that fresh episodes would start in the first half of 2013.
Meantime, Tambor will be back on the small screen later this spring with another character, an out-of-work actor who plays piano at Nordstrom, on his NBC comedy. He’s particularly excited about the fact that this character, too, has a catch phrase.
“I had ‘Hey now’ [on The Larry Sanders Show], ‘There’s always money in the banana stand’ [on Arrested], and now I get ‘I’m bent not broken,'” he said, adding: “So I’m a motto guy.”
