Liza Minnelli joined Arrested Development because Ron Howard's former babysitter said yes
The producers of Arrested Development dreamed of casting Liza Minnelli but assumed a star of her size would never agree. Ron Howard simply rang her. She had looked after him as a teenage babysitter, and she took the part of Lucille 2 for an old friend.
Howard sparked the show in summer 2002 with a wish to make a comedy that looked like handheld reality television but ran on tightly rewritten, heavily rehearsed jokes. Mitchell Hurwitz, one of two writers he met through Imagine Television, proposed a family falling from riches to rags, a timely idea after the Enron and Adelphia accounting scandals. Fox and NBC bid for it, and Fox won with a put pilot carrying a six-figure penalty. The pilot was filmed in March 2003, and the series debuted on November 2 that year.
The Bluths are a once-rich Newport Beach clan still living as if nothing had changed. Jason Bateman plays Michael, the decent son holding things together after his developer father, played by Jeffrey Tambor, is arrested in the very first episode. Will Arnett landed Gob by playing him as a man convinced he was the favourite when everyone could see otherwise. Tobias and George Sr. were meant to be minor, but David Cross and Tambor fitted so well that both parts grew. Howard narrated the pilot as a stopgap, and his voice worked so well it stayed.
Stylistically it broke with the laugh-track sitcom. It was shot on location in HD at 24 frames per second with several cameras, mimicking documentaries, and it leaned on cutaways such as security footage, family photos and archive film. Running jokes built up over many episodes, which delighted loyal viewers but may have put off newcomers and hurt ratings.
Those ratings stayed low, and Fox cancelled it in 2006 despite six Emmys, a Golden Globe and a devoted cult audience. Hurwitz turned down a move to another network, saying he had told the story he wanted. Netflix revived it anyway: 15 episodes arrived together on May 26, 2013, among the service's earliest originals, followed by a fifth season split across 2018 and 2019. Its influence shows in later single-camera comedies such as 30 Rock and Community.
Source: Arrested Development
