At the time, I used to say, "We should market this like Everybody Loves Raymond. It's just a guy dealing with his family." Instead, it was irresistible to show all these funny people. So, I actually think this could be more inviting to a new audience because they can just watch one character, find out what's going on in his life, and then meet another character and find out what's going on in her life, and then see how it intersects the other one.

For the most part you are dealing with jealousy, you are dealing with love, you're dealing with hatred, you are dealing with revenge and all of these sort of classic things.

Everybody keeps falling back to the same patterns without doing too much dramaturgy.

There are a lot of things that are in the show that harken back to the old show, but I really wanted to resist doing a greatest hits. It was irresistible to do a greatest hits, but it was almost too easy. There are things that I know are still ahead of us, in the future of whatever Arrested Development brings.

Violence has not really been an issue. Even in my wildest hopes, I wasn't trying to get violence in.

My knee-jerk is that it is comedy and, if you watch them all back-to-back, you will gain something and you will lose something.

I don't know how that budget would have been worked out, but that was the initial idea. Obviously, we couldn't have had a show with nine expensive actors in it. It was very nice that they were even interested in doing that. But, I was so proud of what we'd done that I couldn't think of a compelling reason to do a lesser version of it.