"Sit Down, Shut Up" and talk about "Arrested Development"

Fox has a new animated comedy titled "Sit Down, Shut Up" coming up, so naturally a lot of the questions during its TV Press Tour session today were about ... "Arrested Development." Which is because "Sit Down, Shut Up" is executive produced by Mitchell Hurwitz, who created "AD," and features the voices of Jason Bateman and Will Arnett.

"Arrested Development," of course, was a program much beloved by the handful of people who actually watched it. Critics raved, it won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series, and was history after two and a half seasons - Fox burned off its final four episodes opposite the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Three years later, it's one of the most popular series available on Hulu.com, however.

So Hurwitz and Company were asked to perform an autopsy on their show: Just why did it die?

Hurwitz: You know, "Arrested Development" really was a show for adults, and it was the kind of show that required -- I mean, we made a choice to do a show that required people to really invest time and energy, and it was a bit of an audacious choice and, as it turned out, a wrong-headed one because they didn't.

Arnett: And I think people maybe felt, along
the way, it was hard to get -- to find a way into "Arrested Development," that, if they hadn't gotten in on it early enough, that somehow it was inaccessible. And, you know, obviously we didn't get the ratings, but we got a lot of love from the critics along the way. And at a certain point, I think that people looked at it as homework, frankly. They thought, "All right. I get it. This show is funny, and I'm supposed to watch." Forget it.

Hurwitz: It may never have worked as a big audience thing, but a lot of it is just timing. It does seem like perhaps there is more of an audience for that kind of thing there right now.

Bateman: With DVD really taking off at that time, too, I think people quickly realized, "Well, I kind of missed the first half-dozen episodes. I'll just wait for the DVD to come out at the end of the year and buy it there and watch it all in a row," which is kind of really the great way to watch it, that or on DVRs which at the time were not being monitored.

Hurwitz: The other kind of interesting historical note was the year I think we went off the air was the year that the Nielsen Company started counting college campuses, which really was like the basis of our audience in many ways.

Arnett: There was a stat. I remember the first time that they did a same-sampling from the DVR -- (in) the Nielsen ratings, we were like fifth from the bottom or something, but in the DVR sampling, we were like 20th
in shows that were TiVo'd. By the way, we never [think] about this.

Bateman: This is a window of how we [spent] the last three years.

Hurwitz: I think basically it comes down
to we shouldn't have used Jeffrey Tambor.

Hurwitz also made the proposed film version seem a little further away or speculative than other reports have suggested. He did offer, however, "We have a
story, which is basically 'Valkyrie' meets 'Hotel For Dogs.'"

The other cast members sounded like they've gotten a little tired of hearing about the halcyon days of "Arrested Development."

"They've been very nice about signing autographs for us," said Nick Kroll. "We don't ask for them. They just sign things and hand them to us."

"I just recycle all the signed DVDs to my kids' school auction," added Tom Kenny. "That's what we all do."