ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Season 5 Will "Definitely Happen," According To The Show's Creator

After the utter brilliance of the first three seasons, I was disappointed with the fourth season of Arrested Development when it hit Netflix a couple of years ago. It seemed like a lot of the wind went out of the show's sails, and considering the "meh" reaction it received from even the diehard fandom and the near-constant state of employment of the people involved with making it, I wondered if we'd seen the last of the Bluth family on the small screen. But creator/showrunner Mitch Hurwitz says that's not the case. In an interview with Esquire, he explained:

It'll happen. It'll definitely happen. Not before the election, but it's definitely going to happen. I say that because the actors want to do it, the studio wants to do it, Netflix wants to do it, I want to do it. It's just making it happen. There's no one resisting. There's a recut, too, of the fourth season, just to make it airable on TV. They're like the old Arrested Developments. We redid all the narration and reshot a few little things. Now we have 22 episodes, and they're delightful to watch and they're much less work than the Netflix series. My hope is we'll find a place to air those.

A recut of the fourth season sounds like a much more enjoyable way to watch those episodes. I just completed a rewatch of the first three seasons and decided to skip rewatching the fourth altogether, but if a recut was available, I'd be much more willing to dive back in and give it another shot.

We've written about how the fifth season was gearing up for a satire about Trump and the rise of murder mystery procedurals, and Hurwitz reaffirmed those intentions:

The clock is ticking. We were putting up a wall before Trump was. There were so many things like that. We had a political race that was going to continue in the fifth season. A lot of people thought what Trump was doing was the more they try to self destruct because they don't want office, the more the crowd gathers around them. Which was a viable theory about Trump...It's crazy. We were also building to a murder mystery and we were laying all these clues, and it was before there was this sudden interest in true crime with Fred Durst, Making a Murderer, and OJ. And there were so many OJ references in the fourth season. We even had Gob find a perfectly good OJ Simpson in the dumpster behind the wax museum. He was, like, driving around with this OJ Simpson and that was going to fit into the murder plot. But we'll find new things. I'm trying, man.

Hurwitz must know about the lackluster reception of the fourth season, and he clearly cares a lot about these characters, so I'm sure he's doing everything in his power to make the fifth season an improvement. It's just unclear exactly when he'll be able to get the actors together to be able to film it. We'll keep you posted with any big developments moving forward.