In 2006, one of television’s most brilliant comedies was cancelled. Arrested Development had only run for a total of three seasons before it was booted from the FOX lineup, but luckily Television’s Savior™ Netflix stepped in to save us from eternal damnation by giving us a full 15-episode fourth season of the show seven years after its initial cancellation.
Unfortunately, mum’s been the word on the definitive future of Netflix’s revival of Arrested Development. The fourth season was just as hilarious as its predecessors, which lead to Netflix ordering 17 new episodes of the show. However, even with that promise, the fact remains that it’s still been three whole years since the streaming service first uploaded the fourth season in 2013. The desperation for new tales of America’s most dysfunctional family isn’t any less dire.
That all changes now, though. In a recent interview with Esquire, the show’s creator Mitch Hurwitz talked about the show. Given that he is so busy with so many different projects, Hurwitz was asked if the fifth season was, indeed, still going to happen. He gave a very reassuring answer:
It’ll happen. It’ll definitely happen. Not before the [2016 presidential] 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.
He also talked about why filming the fifth season has been particularly difficult:
One of the challenges has been a big studio owns it and they don’t make TV this way typically. They sign actors for multiple years of a show, and then they shoot. We’ll get half of the actors available and we won’t quite commit to making the deal, then we’ll lose the other half of the actors.