When Mitch Hurwitz created “Arrested Development,” he relied on fond memories of growing up in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach to build such endearing characters that audiences could not let them go years after they left network television.
As the program neared a return on Netflix early Sunday that had social networks buzzing for months, Hurwitz remembered his life being not much different from the young character George Michael on his show. George Michael appeared in the first three seasons as an adolescent overachiever who runs a frozen banana stand on Balboa Island.
Actually, it was cookies that Hurwitz sold at age 13 with his older brother, Michael, to people headed out to Newport Beach. There were also some youthful flirtations with at least one wealthy and ambitious local family.
“My father said this was a business-centered community, and he wanted us to learn about business and business ethics,” Hurwitz said in a news conference call Thursday morning.
Mark Hurwitz procured an abandoned taco truck for his two sons and named the new business the Chipyard.
Much like George Michael’s relationship with his father, Michael Bluth, Hurwitz remembered his own father trying to balance teaching responsibility with his need to bond with his sons.
“I want you to be selling cookies, until the last drunk stumbles out of the bar at the end of the dock,” Mitch Hurwitz remembered his father saying.
“Then he would turn around and say, ‘Let’s go to a movie,'” he said.
“But I’ve got to sell all these cookies,” Hurwitz told his dad.
“Oh, I’ll buy them. Now, let’s go to a movie,” his father said.
“I was always getting very mixed messages,” Hurwitz said.
Mark Hurwitz still runs Chipyard out of a home office in Orange and a shop in Boston. Mitch Hurwitz went to Georgetown University and returned home as a television writer.
In the sitcom world, Michael Bluth runs the business of a dysfunctional family while trying to instill a moral work ethic in his son. At the same time, Michael fights feelings that he’s being overbearing.
Some critics have viewed the satire of “Arrested Development,” which aired three seasons on Fox from 2003 to 2006, as portraying people of Orange County as shallow, greedy and more than a little crazy.
But when Hurwitz talks about his home, he exudes more affection than disdain.
Time was, Hurwitz said he thought he’d never find anything funny about Orange County. After all, all the great comedy writers, like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, were from New York, not Estancia High School.
But like Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Mo., or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesville, Ohio, Hurwitz turned to what he knew and the place where he lived for inspiration. He mined so much material from Orange County that people continued to discuss and blog about his jokes for seven years after “Arrested Development” was canceled.
A new generation discovered the episodes of the wacky Bluth family online at places like Netflix and from renting it on DVD. Popularity swelled, and Netflix asked Hurwitz and producer Ron Howard to make another season. As Sunday’s return neared, hundreds lined up in London, New York and Los Angeles for frozen bananas at stands hyping the release of all 15 new episodes.
In a show where audiences have become obsessed with what’s on the walls of the sets, Hurwitz wanted to get everything just right about his home – even the shirts and haircuts the extras wear.
“Orange County is part of the DNA of the show, for sure,” Hurwitz said.
On social media and Internet discussion boards, followers have dissected “Arrested Development” down to the blue marks on the walls of a Bluth-built house that proved an inside joke to regular viewers. A trailer for the fourth season flashed a UC Irvine pennant on the wall of George Michael’s room.
Hurwitz builds his comedy on such detail. He created a type of documentary style that has been replicated on subsequent shows such as “Modern Family.” NPR recently built a graphic to track running gags through the first three seasons.
“Our show thrives under that kind of scrutiny,” said Jessica Walter, who portrays Lucille Bluth, the matriarchal lush of the dysfunctional family.
Hurwitz said he fretted over Reyn Spooner T-shirts.
“You can’t walk down a street in Orange County without seeing people in Reyn Spooner T-shirts, and we couldn’t find enough of them,” Hurwitz said. “There was this certain kind of haircut I couldn’t get on our extras. Orange County just has this specific culture you can’t find anywhere else.”
Of course, the Bluths had to be in the land-development business. Hurwitz grew up watching the plowing under of orange groves and rolling hills of rich green crops.
Jeffrey Tambor, whose character, George Bluth Sr., is an unscrupulous developer willing to build houses even for Saddam Hussein, remembered those fields, too. Tambor said one of his early acting jobs brought him to the South Coast Repertory.
“There were all bean fields down there,” Tambor said.
“Not anymore,” Hurwitz said. “Now they’re all Barnes & Nobles.”
“Or Nordstroms,” Tambor said.
“I dated a Nordstrom,” Hurwitz blurted out, like a sudden revelation in the Bluth family.
“Which one?” Tambor asked. Despite being friends for years with Hurwitz, this appeared to be news to Tambor.
“I don’t know if I should say her name,” Hurwitz said. “She was a Mormon and I don’t want to out her as someone who was dating.”
Contact the writer: rsylvester@ocregister.com
