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Screening highlights; Mitchell Hurwitz presents …
Television writer Mitchell Hurwitz joined several hundred adoring, milk shake drinking comedy fans (so different from the cocktail-swilling crowd at Thursday’s “Mad Men” screening) at the Alamo Ritz Friday night to present two pieces: an episode of “Everything’s Relative,” a 1999 sitcom starring “Arrested Development” actor Jeffrey Tambor that ran for only 2 episodes and the longer, unedited “Arrested Development” pilot (that Emmy award-winning series ran for 3 seasons on FOX).
Hurwitz said he hadn’t seen the “Everything’s Relative” episode “in probably 10 years” and claimed to be embarrassed by it (“I understand now some of the things the critics said”) but, interestingly, he admitted being disappointed in the “Arrested” pilot as well, intimating that nothing seems to turn out as good as he hopes it will be. While he enjoyed a tremendous amount of creative freedom on the show, largely due to executive producer Ron Howard’s clout, Hurwitz’ biggest enemy seems to remain the clock: there’s just so much stuff that has to be cut to shoehorn an episode into 20 minutes.
“Everything’s Relative” was definitely a precursor to “Arrested Development,’ with episodes exploring bizarre family dynamics and featuring absurd cut-aways and sound effects. The episode Hurwitz screened Friday featured a plot line about Mexican baskets, each mention of which was accompanied by audio of what sounded like a barbershop quartet singing the phrase “Mexican basket!” It also included unexplained flys’-eye camera shots with multifaceted, kaleidoscopic imagery.
The “Arrested” pilot, interestingly, was unbleeped, and it was a little odd and discomfiting to hear expletives dropping from the character’s mouths as if it were an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Hurwitz later suggested — and rightly so — that the course language is actually funnier when bleeped, a problem he’ll have to deal with now that he’s writing the big-screen version of the show.
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