By now, Jason Bateman is absolutely a household name, but if not for Arrested Development, he might’ve totally faded from view. That was the show that really catapulted him into the celebrity world, but it’s also the one that stopped him from pursuing other things.
Arrested Development Gave Us Jason Bateman
After experiencing plenty of stardom in his youth thanks to Little House on the Prairie and other hits, Bateman was quickly becoming a star in Hollywood. But those opportunities dried up, and the ones he got weren’t very successful.
He filmed a ton of pilots, and only some of them made it into a full show. The ones that did didn’t really make it past a season, so the work was quickly fading. Bateman, at the time, was considering hanging it up and taking what he’d earned and starting over somewhere.
“I would’ve bought a little coffee shop in some small town in Western Europe, learned the language and made local villager friends,” he said while revealing all this in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It sounds so stupid, but I would’ve walked around with a little apron on and sat at everyone’s table and just had a quaint, little life — and I bet I would have loved it.”
Had that happened, we would’ve been robbed as a society of one of our best and most multi-talented creatives. So what changed? Arrested Development happened. In 2003, he got the starring role as Michael Bluth, the straight man opposite his wild family’s craziness.
The show didn’t take off, but critics loved it, and those who approved shows and movies did as well, so it got three seasons. Initially, Bateman felt like the show was exactly the sort of thing that didn’t need him. “It was amazing, and all I could think was, ‘Oh f***, this sounds like the exact thing that they wouldn’t want my stink on,’” he said. “I was the traditional multicam, studio-audience guy, and there they were trying to do something kind of punk rock in this new single-camera comedy world.”
But because he’d been so close to bottoming out of the industry, he’s become better at handling opportunities. He obviously went on from Arrested Development to star in countless things, most notably Ozark, Zootopia, Juno, and Carry-On.
“I’ve got friends who had bottoms that were pretty chilling, but I was lucky enough to recognize, ‘This is probably as far as I should go if I still want to accomplish the things that I want to get to,’” the actor added. “I was conscious the whole time of wanting to get a lot of these boxes checked before I became a father and a guy with a career that I not only wanted but had a feeling I might be able to get it if I just got the right job.”
He’s referencing the partying he did when the opportunities weren’t so forthcoming. He decided then to make up for lost time, doing pretty much anything he could get his hands on. That said, he was always conscious of going too far and jeopardizing the potential career he still felt like he could have.
Obviously, after Arrested Development, the rest is history. He parlayed that successful role into more, like in Juno, and slowly but surely built up his resume and continued to add roles and cement himself as a Hollywood mainstay when he was moments away from giving it all up.
Conclusion
Jason Bateman is one of the most prolific actors today, with a career dating back roughly five decades, even though he’s not yet been alive for six decades. Without Arrested Development (the funniest television show of all time), though, it’s very plausible that he would be doing almost anything else, and the world would be worse for it.
