Mitchell Hurwitz makes family comedy sharply funny by letting bad behaviour spread through several stories at once. We recommend his work with the Bluths warmly, though his fondness for complicated plotting can ask more patience than the jokes deserve.
Fi1m perspective
The Bluths have lost their money, but sharing a model home has not made them easier company. In Arrested Development (2003), Mitchell Hurwitz and fellow writer Jim Vallely turn the difficulty of getting a family to behave into a comedy worth following closely. We laughed at their inability to endure one another: financial ruin is a substantial problem, but apparently not enough to interrupt the usual bad behaviour. Hurwitz keeps that ordinary irritation recognisable even as he adds more stories to follow.
His earlier work on The Golden Girls gave him practice in traditional multi-camera joke-writing, a useful foundation for the number of laughs he tries to fit into Arrested Development. He wrote the Arrested Development pilot, then wrote or co-wrote every episode of its first three seasons. The pleasure is in watching him make those basic skills serve a much more crowded programme without abandoning the characters. He also co-created Running Wilde (2010) with Will Arnett, and later co-created Lady Dynamite (2016), which continued his interest in experimental comedy structures.
The handheld camerawork makes the Bluths look caught in the middle of behaving badly, rather than neatly presented for our inspection. Ron Howard's narration, archive footage and on-screen text give jokes somewhere to go besides the dialogue. Hurwitz's precise timing with a large ensemble helps keep all those interruptions funny. The callbacks reward another look because an earlier detail can become funny again once we know more. We do not need every thread to be equally good when the performances make the family worth spending time with.
The later stretches show how tiring this can become. Hurwitz co-directed every episode of the fourth season (2013), then later re-edited its non-linear, character-centred structure into a more conventional order. Across five seasons, our reservation is that the writers sometimes keep returning to behaviour that has stopped surprising us, with more arranging than the eventual laugh warrants. Even a capable cast cannot make every familiar habit funny indefinitely, and there are passages we would happily shorten. Start Arrested Development at the beginning, and give it the attention its cast and its better jokes deserve.
Biography
Mitchell Hurwitz is an American television writer, producer and actor. Born on 29 May 1963 in Anaheim, California, he graduated from Georgetown University. He began his career writing for sitcoms including The Golden Girls in the early 1990s.
Hurwitz created the sitcom Arrested Development (2003–2006, revived 2013 and 2018–2019), on which he also served as writer, executive producer and co-director of the fourth season. The series won multiple Primetime Emmy Awards, including for Outstanding Comedy Series and writing. He co-created The Ellen Show and has developed other pilots and series such as Running Wilde and Lady Dynamite.
