Ahead of the show’s release on Netflix on May 20, Esquire’s Matt Miller caught up with Mitch Hurwitz to discuss Lady Dynamite, Donald Trump, and to get an update on Arrested Development!
[dropcap size=small]D[/dropcap]espite the fact that Arrested Development has had plenty of success since it’s debut in 2003, there were questions to whether it would get renewed for a fifth season.
One show that Arrested Development producer has worked on while he has had some time is Lady Dynamite, a new arrival on Netflix in 2016. It is already one of the best comedies of the year, starring Maria Bamford (playing as a form of herself). Her character lives her life trying to keep hold of her job while dealing with mental illness. Check out the trailer for it below!
Hurwitz met up with Esquire’s Matt Miller to discuss Lady Dynamite, Donald Trump and an update on Arrested Development.
Hey Mitch, it’s Matt Miller from Esquire.
You are not the Matt Miller I thought you were going to be. Did you ever listen to Left, Right & Center? It was an LA Show, and Matt Miller was the guy who hosted it.
Oh shoot, I hope I didn’t disappoint you.
No, he actually knew a lot about the budget and debt, and I was actually kind of worried that you would want to talk about the deficit. I’m not that prepared to talk about the deficit and debt right now. I can try.
Don’t worry, I don’t have anything about the deficit prepared. You’re safe.
I’m relieved.
I know you originally worked with Maria in the fourth season of Arrested Development. Tell me how you came across her and what draws you to her style of comedy?
There was this Los Angeles Magazine 100 Funniest People in LA [event], and it was 2004 or 2005 and Zack Galifanakis was there and no one knew who he was. I saw her at this, and I kind of became obsessed with her comedy. There was such humanity in every single thing she said, yet she had this ability to make you bark with laughter. She just has this unbelievable gift of timing. Everything she says is an exploration of dark aspects of herself. It was thrilling. She had so much to say. She loves self-help books, she’s done so much work on herself, and she’s one step ahead of the audience. You do spend some of the time trying to sort out what her point of view is. And it’s an effort. I first worked with her on an animated show I did Sit Down, Shut Up, and I was trying to get her to do one of the voices. Then, this was of the great injustices of entertainment: Basically Fox—I’ll name names: [former Chairman of Entertainment] Kevin Reilly—said, “I don’t think we should use Maria Bamford as this main character. She doesn’t have a good voice for cartoons.” Then I wrote that part on Arrested to just put her in there. And I really think her performance was unbelievable.
Did you approach her with this idea? This show has such a unique treatment of mental illness, was it your intention to have it revolve around this topic?
I always felt that it was a central part of her act, but she wasn’t the crazy comic. There’s some actors who are overweight and that becomes part of the act. She wasn’t like that. The material she does about mental illness connects with an audience that isn’t mentally ill. Everyone understands beating themselves up, everyone understands taking on too much, everyone understands not being in control. They may not have a clinical level of it, but they do understand it. I certainly felt that way. I’ve never been hospitalized for mental illness, and I understood. I reached out to her and said, “I really want to do a show with you.” I think now is her time. It would be really hard to do a show with her on network television. There’s too much at stake, you’re trying to defeat other networks, you’re not just trying to have a good show. I have a first look production deal with Netflix, and when I sat down with Ted Sarandos, at the end of the session, I said I really want to do something with Maria Bamford. And he said, “Oh, well, let’s just do that right now.” I cannot imagine another human being in this town saying that. When I asked him why, he just said, “Well, she’s a genius.”
So, would this have never worked on network television?
Well it might not work on Netflix, either [Laughs]. No, I don’t think we ever considered that. Really, television was designed to defeat the other networks. You can’t just have a hit, you have to have a hit that drives others off the air. As a result, decisions are made understandably more cautiously, and oftentimes based on fear. At Netflix, they seem to make projects based on what they think there’s value in creatively.That’s what makes Maria so special. That’s how you find the Bob Dylans.
How do you find the balance of making mental illness funny?
It’s risky, and there are many, many ways to tell these stories from people with different perspectives. I don’t think we’re trying to do anything but tell one person’s story. I think Maria’s story is very personal. The thing we’re making humor out of is the good intentions of over-correction. Hopefully the humor in it is about all of our struggle to overcome our demons.
I know you’ve been working for a while on season five of Arrested Development, but now with Lady Dynamite premiering this week, are you going to get some time to move forward with that?
I’m always trying to move forward with that project regardless of what else is going on in my life. One of the challenges has been a big studio owns it and they don’t make TV this way typically. They sign actors for multiple years of a show, and then they shoot. We’ll get half of the actors available and we won’t quite commit to making the deal, then we’ll lose the other half of the actors. I spent some time in the writers room developing an outline for the next season or seasons if we’re able to make a deal. I’m trying very hard to get it done because we have a great story to tell. The clock is ticking. We were putting up a wall before Trump was. There were so many things like that. We had a political race that was going to continue in the fifth season. A lot of people thought what Trump was doing was the more they try to self destruct because they don’t want office, the more the crowd gathers around them. Which was a viable theory about Trump.
I was going to mention that, because so many plots from the fourth season have become the real thing with Trump.
I know. It’s crazy. We were also building to a murder mystery and we were laying all these clues, and it was before there was this sudden interest in true crime with Robert Durst, Making a Murderer, and OJ. And there were so many OJ references in the fourth season. We even had Gob find a perfectly good OJ Simpson in the dumpster behind the wax museum. He was, like, driving around with this OJ Simpson and that was going to fit into the murder plot. But we’ll find new things. I’m trying, man.
Does it still seem doable before the election?
It’ll happen. It’ll definitely happen. Not before the election, but it’s definitely going to happen. I say that because the actors want to do it, the studio wants to do it, Netflix wants to do it, I want to do it. It’s just making it happen. There’s no one resisting. There’s a recut, too, of the fourth season, just to make it airable on TV. They’re like the old Arrested Developments. We redid all the narration and reshot a few little things. Now we have 22 episodes, and they’re delightful to watch and they’re much less work than the Netflix series. My hope is we’ll find a place to air those.
So there you have it! It’s going to take a while for this plan to unfold, but Hurwitz and the Arrested Development crew are on it to get this show back on air.
