Mitch Hurwitz, creator of the hit show Arrested Development, participated in a reddit AMA (ask me anything) today. Here’s what he had to say about the story going forward (which could be a fifth season or a movie).
As we cover both Arrested Development and Google quite a bit, one particular response unrelated to actual ‘Arrested’ news seemed worth highlighting.
Fans of the show know what a “never nude” is. For the rest of you, Tobias Fünke, a character played by David Cross, is one of these. It’s a psychological condition in which he can never bring himself to be nude, so instead, he always wears a minimum of blue-jean cut-offs.
One redditor asked Hurwitz ” if there was any inspiration in real life that led to the idea of Tobias being a Never Nude?”
His response was this:
No, there wasn’t. The Never Nude thing – I will trace the etiology of that idea, and it’s this. We had this joke that just put us out, that was Tobias keeps crying in the shower. And then I had pitched – I was thinking about production, and the way they shoot those things, they always put people in flesh colored bathing suits, and I said, what if we show part of the flesh colored bathing suits for 3-4 weeks – and then in the 4th week we reveal that he showers in a flesh-colored bathing suit because he doesn’t like showering naked. And then Richie Rosenstock (who’s an absolutely brilliant, hilarious guy – and is responsible for so many of the giant laughs in the show) said without hesitation: “Oh, he’s a Never Nude.”
And everybody in the room froze. And looked at him, and said, “is that a real thing?” and he shrugged, and it was just so funny. It wasn’t a funny idea until Richie called him a Never Nude, which took the joke from being just a sight gag, to a psychological affliction that really elevated it in such a brilliant way. And then I remember looking up to see online if there was such a thing as a Never Nude – and guess what you can’t search for besides finding pornography? “Never Nude” – back then you’d get 25,000 pages with the word “Nude” in it. Even if you used the Boolean quotation marks, you would still get things like “Hot 18 year old who’d NEVER been NUDE in front of a boy!” So we’ll never know if it was a thing before ARRESTED. Although I suppose I could just ask Richie.
He doesn’t specifically mention Google, but this is somewhat amusing given that Google has been going out of its way to hide nudity in image search results in recent months.
