Well, this is pretty good news.
The Bluth family will reportedly reunite on Netflix for a fifth season of Arrested Development, according to executive producer Brian Grazer.
Here’s what he told The Wrap on Wednesday:
“I think we’re really close to pulling it off finally,” Grazer told TheWrap on Wednesday. “All of the actors have agreed to do it and I think they’ve agreed to their compensation structure. That’s been the hardest–it’s all hard…But it should be happening soon.”
Fans have been clamoring for more “Arrested Development” for years now. Grazer has previously said in 2015 that more episodes of the show were imminent on Netflix.
“Netflix is determined to do more episodes, so we’re going to do more episodes,” he said at the time. Production was slated to begin after Jan. 1, but clearly that did not come to pass.
The show’s fourth-season revival on Netflix was a mixed bag, with most of the cast only available for a partial shooting schedule, it was a much less coherent affair than the intricate earlier run. The writers did what they could, though, fashioning a season-long plot that continually built upon itself, but it’s tough for any show to live up to early-period Arrested Development, so it was always going to be tough for an inherently weakened version of the show to live up to expectations.
However, season 4 did serve to lay return groundwork, and if the cast’s new deal is for more involvement than the last time around (a fair assumption as to the reasoning behind the delay), that opens the door for many possibilities that just weren’t an option last time around.
Arrested Development was a show that probably benefited from network constraints, to a degree. It didn’t waste a second of its 22-minute runtime on FOX. (Of course, FOX also torpedoed the show by doing things like airing it out of order, so let’s not throw a party for network television.) And even the worst possible versions of Arrested Development are going to have a baseline of entertainment value that makes them worth watching.
The cast is just too talented. And that’s why this news is great.
As to how the producers found the budget to pay for all this, well, maybe they were following people to their cars again.
[The Wrap]
