After four long years, The Bluth Family will return to Netflix for another run as Season 5 of Arrested Development has just received the green light. The new episodes are expected to hit the streaming service sometime in 2018.
Fans of the Mitch Hurwitz comedy can start getting excited as, according to THR, the entire original series cast is onboard for Season 5. Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter, Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Will Arnett, Tony Hale, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat and David Cross are all expected to reprise their iconic roles of George, Lucille, Michael, Lindsay, G.O.B., Buster, George Michael, Maeby and Tobias Fünke.
Arrested Development made its original three season run on Fox from 2003 to 2006. The series then made a triumphant return to the world with its Season 4 premiere on Netflix in 2013.
“In talks with Netflix we all felt that stories about a narcissistic, erratically behaving family in the building business — and their desperate abuses of power — are really underrepresented on TV these days,” said Hurwitz. “I am so grateful to them and to 20th TV for making this dream of mine come true in bringing the Bluths, George Sr., Lucille and the kids — Michael, Ivanka, Don Jr., Eric, George-Michael, and who am I forgetting, oh Tiffany. Did I say Tiffany? — back to the glorious stream of life.”
Season 4 of Arrested Development originally consisted of 15 episodes, each with a 31-38 minute runtime. To the delight of fans, Hurwitz announced last year that (for potential syndication purposes) he had recut the entire season into 22 episodes, making them approximately 22 minutes each. Adding to that, he reworked the content of the episodes to be more ensemble-like as opposed to focused on individual characters. “It really works!” Hurwitz said of the recut. “It’s totally different storytelling with all of these millions of pieces.”
The Season 4 recut is currently sitting on a shelf but Hurwitz’s hopes are that the episodes will ultimately be shown on Netflix. It’s not entirely implausible to think the recut could land on the streaming service in advance of Season 5 but we’ll all just have to wait and see.