Green Mountain

Paul Brownfield is an AwardsLine contributor. On May 26 at 12:01 a.m., 15 new episodes of Arrested Development went live on Netflix; by 5 a.m., the series’ legions of fans probably had exhausted the new supply. The comedy’s cancellation of Arrested by Fox in 2006, after two seasons, prompted an afterlife of rumors and almost-announcements, as series creator Mitch Hurwitz worked on a feature script of his cult series. Like the fans, Hurwitz didn’t want to let go of his extended band of crazies, the Bluths, either. And then Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, suggested resurrecting the show to Imagine Entertainment’s Ron Howard. “And Ron said, ‘That’s a very nice thought, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen,’” Hurwitz says. Except it did happen. Related: EMMYS: Comedy Series Overview AwardsLine: How different was the process in working with Netflix? Mitch Hurwitz: I wasn’t turning scripts in, because of the nature of the thing. We weren’t shooting one a week. We’d shoot pieces of eight different episodes in any given week. We were shooting 12, 14 pages a day, shooting like crazy. We screened it at the premiere — it was the first time an audience had seen it, but it was also the first time I’d seen two (episodes) in a row. I’d just been making them and putting ... Read More »

Fifteen languages, multiple platforms and one great institution: that is Scientific American , which celebrates its 168th year in August. I had another occasion to appreciate all of the above recently when we held our annual meeting of the international editions in New York City for the first time in many years. The multicultural mix, I have always thought, simply reflects the global collaborative nature of science itself.