You just can’t keep Will Arnett off of television, and anyone who tries should have to spend a week or two working for Gob Bluth. A few months after CBS’ unceremonious cancellation of his sitcom The Millers, Arnett is reteaming with Netflix and Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz for the live-action drama-tinged comedy Flaked. Can we get please J.B. Smoove and Margo Martindale on this one, too?
Set to run across the course of eight episodes, Flaked will star Arnett as the honesty-avoiding, sobriety-leaning Chip, a Venice, California resident who builds himself up as a life guru. Once he begins falling in love with the woman that his best friend desires, Chip finds his falsified foundations crumbling as dark truths are unearthed. This leaves his vastly important image in a negative spotlight, and he’ll probably learn something about himself by the time all is said and done.
Nobody does self-important like Will Arnett, so it should be no surprise that he co-created and co-wrote the series, along with Mark Chappel, one of the co-writers on the David Cross-created comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. (More Arrested Development quasi-connections!) Hurwitz, who has an overall deal with Netflix, will be on board as an executive producer. All of these guys working together means Flaked will probably be comedic gold, but the press release does refer to it as a “serio-comedy,” so maybe there will be one crying scene that has nothing to do with Arnett’s character.
Flaked is the second Netflix series Arnett will front, as he’s already the lead of the hilarious R-rated animated comedy BoJack Horseman, which is going into Season 2 later this year. Oddly enough, that show was also about someone whose self-perpetuated lies ended up coming to the surface as the season went on, making for some surprisingly mature moments sprinkled in all the drunken debauchery. Here’s hoping Flaked takes that to an even deeper place.
I’m sure Arnett feels a lot more at home with Netflix, without the risk of abrupt cancellations hanging over his head. The Millers was four episodes into Season 2 when CBS decided to pull the plug, not just removing the possibility of a Season 3, but also yanking the show from the schedule after five episodes. (Canada got to see the Thanksgiving-themed sixth episode.) Netflix will be putting all eight episodes of Flaked up at once, and there’s no better guarantee than that.
Flaked – which joins an upcoming slate of Netflix comedies including the Wet Hot American Summer series, Richie Rich, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and more – is set to premiere across all of Netflix’s territories in 2016. Now let’s talk about turning that LEGO Batman movie into a Netflix series.
