Never nude. The Banana Stand. “The Final Countdown.” Kissing cousins. (“You kissed?” Michael Bluth asks. “We did a little more than that,” his son squirms. Flash-cut to a black-and-white still of a ballplayer sliding headfirst into base. A noisemaker blares. The crowd goes wild.)
Arrested Development didn’t start from scratch – The Simpsons, Sports Night, Spaced, Herman’s Head, Scrubs, and the original British The Office had already started dismantling the conventional sitcom by the time Arrested Development premiered on Fox in 2003. But Mitchell Hurwitz’s comedy about the deeply dysfunctional, mostly at-war Bluth family managed to compact every earlier innovation (single camera; no laugh track; intertextuality; dense, even soap-operatic storylines) into 22-minute bursts of brilliant, subversive stuff and was routinely called television’s best show. As in, ever.
It was gone too soon, canceled in 2006, but fans of the show might as well have “Never Forget” tattooed on their hearts – and there are fans for sure at Austin Film Festival, which announced on Monday that Hurwitz would receive this year’s Outstanding Television Writer Award at the coming festival in October. Previous honorees include Greg Daniels, David Milch, Mike Judge, and Garry Shandling; the process of selecting each year’s awardees, according to Conference Director Maya Perez, comes down to “an amalgam of strategy and, dare I say, kismet.” And, of course, who gets staffers most excited.
“Our staff is pretty representative of our audience,” says Perez. “Everyone here loves movies and TV – big and small. We pick panelists and awardees who we, as film and TV lovers, want to know how they do what they do. These are the people we want to sit down and listen to ourselves.”
The Austin Film Festival runs Oct. 22-29; the screenwriting conference runs Oct. 22-25. For more information, including how to purchase a badge, visit www.austinfilmfestival.com.
This article appears in July 10 • 2009.
