Mitchell Hurwitz Quotes

#1. 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.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#2. There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#3. I always liked magic. I was always embarrassed by liking magic because I liked the fact that they're just lying.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#4. The TV industry works in this crazy system where everybody's trying to get the same actors at the same time.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#5. I think it's a big part of being a creative person.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#6. I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#7. Chance favors the well prepared. The more stuff you throw in, the more chances you have of looking like, 'I did that.'

Mitchell Hurwitz

#8. I think that timing is everything. At first, it was too soon. And then, the time was right, but I was busy with other things, and the cast was busy with other things. By the time we sat down to work on the movie, enough time had passed that suddenly a different story emerged.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#9. If you've never watched people watch television, I don't recommend it. It's not an exciting thing to do.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#10. One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#11. The form came out of the function because it is for the audience that already knows the show, while hoping to get a new audience, too.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#12. I have this identity for myself as a writer and the only thing that can happen is that I chip away from it.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#13. Well, at the time, you have to remember that we were not successful. The Showtime offer, as it was presented to me, was half the money for half the show. I was not interested, at that point, in doing a smaller cast and a more simplified Arrested Development.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#14. There's real peril in trying to repeat yourself, and apply rules that applied to something else to a new project.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#15. What's realistic to me is that families love each other and stand by each other. What's unrealistic is that they would ever say that.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#16. Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#17. There 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

#18. 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 Hurwitz

#19. 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.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#20. The "executive producer" title either means that you're the person who created, or co-created, the show, or you're the person who's in charge of day-to-day operations. Whereas "producer" is often just a writing credit.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#21. The revolution is here. It's established that Netflix is a place where you can get premium content. It's a whole new world. It's very interesting. We'll be discovering it together. It's going to be interesting because they don't have a lot to compare it to.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#22. Writers 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 Hurwitz

#23. You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#24. I had a cookie business there, with my brother, when we were growing up, called the Chip Yard, and that became the inspiration for the banana stand. My father said that he wanted us to develop a work ethic, so we'd sit there selling cookies, all day.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#25. Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#26. We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#27. The people that always impress me are the ones that are curious about what they're going to do next.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#28. As somebody who wanted to be creative, growing up, I remember always thinking that the thing I had going against me was Orange County because it seemed like all of the comedy was coming out of New York, and it still is, to a certain extent.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#29. They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#30. It's like, if I had the luxury of choice, and didn't have to worry about making a living, I would definitely want to get into whatever field it was that allowed me to push further and further comedically. Because that's the joy of it.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#31. One of the things I liked about bringing this show back was that it gives people something to look forward to. In doing the show, I was very aware that some people will watch it all in one night, but there is enough that it will be fun to re-watch. Hopefully, people will be laughing a lot.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#32. Television is so much about continuing to work with people.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#33. With 'Arrested Development,' we tried showing the deep disdain that connects a family. We wanted to hold up a mirror to American society. And, just as predicted, America looked away.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#34. Character is what someone does, much more than who they are. I can be sarcastic or I can be fearful, but it doesn't really matter until there's a story - until someone comes in and holds us hostage.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#35. Shows don't reunite because television doesn't work that way. There's no profit model and people go off to do other work.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#36. I think of there being two conditions that creative people go through. I think it's fear and curiosity.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#37. What you'll gain is the macro story. You'll get a good command of that. And what you might lose is some of the fun of it.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#38. When you don't have a laugh track, you can make the clothes funny. We can make a sign funny. We can make the way somebody walks funny. The makeup can be funny.

Mitchell Hurwitz

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

Mitchell Hurwitz

#40. There'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 Hurwitz

#41. First of all, there is absolutely an order that we have put together to create the maximum number of surprises, but that's just part of our storytelling.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#42. We started writing the shows in order, and then very quickly had to jump to, "Oh, we got Tony Hale today and Jessica [Walter." We've got to jump ahead and write that stuff that's in Jessica's show. Fortunately, we knew the story, but it was challenging.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#43. I will tell you that we're all human beings, and we all care about what people think of us. But in general, their outlook is, "We're not looking at opening night numbers. We're not looking at opening night box office. We want this to be part of the reason you come to our service."

Mitchell Hurwitz

#44. Television 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 Hurwitz

#45. I joked recently that I thought 30 seconds a day for three years would be the best way to enjoy it, and I'm going to stand by that statement.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#46. People have outs for numbers of episodes, usually, written into their contract. Some studios will say, "We're going to let Julia Louis-Dreyfus off of Veep to do three episodes, but not three episodes of the same show." But, that's all business affairs, so I'm talking over my head here.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#47. The more constraints I have, the more opportunities I have to be creative to fix those constraints.

Mitchell Hurwitz

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

Mitchell Hurwitz

#49. Even on the old show, we would maybe not all be in the scene. Sometimes there would be a penthouse scene and everyone would get together. But, even in that context, it would be because somebody was missing.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#50. We will be looking at things like the confluence of a scene, and we still have all these creative decisions to make. In general, we're going to just try to make these under a half-hour. We're going to try to take that kind of cable TV comedy model.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#51. I hope to take advantage of the Netflix organism and see if there are ways to get in new material and see if there are ways to do deleted scenes.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#52. We started gearing our content more to what makes us laugh and stories we wanted to tell, and we had to decide, early on, to not be precious about it.

Mitchell Hurwitz

#53. I think everybody wants to be loved, all the time, but it's not realistic. It's also not realistic, if you're going to be ambitious, in terms of changing the form or evolving.

Mitchell Hurwitz