!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yup, that pretty much sums up what everyone is feeling right now. This afternoon at a New Yorker Festival event that reunited the entire Arrested Development cast, show creator Mitch Hurwitz announced plans to bring the short-lived cult TV show back to the air prior to releasing the highly anticipated movie that’s expected to bow, um, sometime in the future. The plan is to produce a “limited-run series” (think 9 or 10 episodes) that will shed light on what each of the Bluths have been up to since we lost them in 2006.

How did this all come about? In Hurwitz’s own words: “We don’t completely own the property, there are business people involved and studios and that kind of thing. Just creatively, I have been working on the screenplay for a long time and found that as time went by, there was so much more to the story. In fact, where everyone’s been for five years became a big part of the story. So in working on the screenplay, I found even if I just gave five minutes per character to that back story, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together.” And thus the plan to return to TV was born.

As it stands now, Hurwitz wants to focus on “almost one character per episode.” He offered the giddy audience at the event an example of how this could work. The first episode might feature oddball Buster Bluth. “The latest joke we have is that it’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there’s all these scientists in lab coats and they’re waiting for somebody. Buster comes through the door in a white lab coat – ‘Let’s begin’ – and they say, ‘Oh, no, you don’t get to wear the lab coat. We’re experimenting on you.’ And then we go through his life and we meet the people in his life and maybe he goes to see his therapist who he’s getting a good rate on because it’s Tobias and he’s lost his license. We can do cross overs and things like that. But it’s an unusual style of show I think and we get him to a certain point of peril in his life and then maybe we jump over to like Maeby and she’s living with Cornel West … We’ll do this kind of thing that builds the peril in their lives until they all come together, really, in the first scene of the movie.” Ha! So you get it? Each of the 9 or 10 episodes will focus on a specific Bluth and catch us up on what they’ve been up to all this time. And then when the movie releases, we’ll know what’s up and Hurwitz will be able to tell a tighter story without wasting time catching us up on all the characters. It’s win-win for everybody!

That is, of course, if the studios play nice with one another. Hurwitz added that the project “requires studios to work together that don’t typically work together, film and TV.” It’s still up in the air as to whether or not the show will air on FOX again.

Now I bet you’re wondering about a time frame; when can we expect the Bluths to return to the small screen if the studios allow it? Jason Bateman, who played the family backbone Michael Bluth, said, “There’s business left to be done, but creatively we are all on board and have a very specific plan about how it would come out and what we would do and when we would shoot it. I think we’re targeting next summer to shoot it.” “Perhaps the series is in the fall. This isn’t my decision,” Hurwitz chimed in. Later in the day, Bateman took to Twitter and shared this: “It’s true. We will do 10 episodes and the movie. Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early ‘13. VERY excited!”

So there you have it. Arrested Development is on track to RETURN TO TELEVISION and then make it to the BIG SCREEN. AD fans ’round the world are crying tears of joy today, as they well should be. Let’s just hope it all pans out…because it will…right?

[Via NYTimes]