In case you haven’t been paying attention to the media over the last two years, the cult favorite Fox television comedy Arrested Development, which ran from 2003-2006, is being revived for new episodes on the streaming service NetFlix. While the entire original cast that made up the dysfunctional Bluth family and creator Mitch Hurwitz have returned to the series, being that the revival is more of a one-time “event” than an ongoing series the stars of the show had an unusal arrangement in terms of how much they were paid per episode. Entertainment Weekly published an article about how much the stars of the series would be getting for coming back for another go-around.
As part of the revival, each of the show’s stars was promised at least one starring episode, which factored in how much that person was paid. The actors were paid $125,000 for each “starring” episode and $50,000 for any episode in which their characters had more than 90 seconds of airtime. Any episode which features less than 90 seconds of their particular character netted them $10,000, and a clips of old footage in episodes would net them an extra $1000.
However, Hurwitz is quick to note that “starring” episodes does not mean “solo” episodes. He says, “Everyone has their own chapter, but they’re all Bluths, so they occur in each other’s stories, and it does take place over the same period of time. In the old show we jumped around so quickly. We’d find out that Tobias photographed his testicles in the bathtub and they got mistaken for a map of Iraq. In the new one, he would photograph his testicles — and then we would spend a little more time with his testicles, we’d investigate, we’d go deeper in and around his testicles in a way I just haven’t had the freedom to do, quite frankly.”
That would have made an excellent promotional slogan: Arrested Development on NetFlix — Now with more testicles!
