One of the challenges of the show has always been trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching it. Now that people have started watching it, they get ahead of us. We've all started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.
Mitchell HurwitzTelevision is a very writer-driven business, and it's one of the few parts of entertainment where writers are treated with respect, only because they need you. If they didn't have to treat you with respect, they would be happy to dismiss you.
Mitchell HurwitzWriters need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."
Mitchell HurwitzThere's a lot that you can do in television that you can't do with a film, theoretically. At the time, the only possibility was to do a movie.
Mitchell HurwitzWe figured the interesting question for them is, "Where has the family been since 2006, since the last time we saw them?" So, part of the time, we had to spend answering that question. Then, inevitably, it goes up to a point of crisis, in everyone's show. There was just no getting around that it was about 2006-2012.
Mitchell HurwitzThere was so much talk about the movie and we thought, "Wouldn't it be great to still do the movie, but to give everybody this thing they didn't see coming?" Even with the number of episodes, it was reported that there was going to be 10 episodes, and then there was talk about adding more.
Mitchell Hurwitz