Another Season of Arrested Development? Mitch Hurwitz Sure Hopes So

arrested development fifth season

We’re not sure how many more times we’ll be able to get our hopes up before we finally give up, but any glimmer of hope is always a positive thing, right?

‘Arrested Development’ saw a solid three season run on FOX only to be cancelled after failing to capture a big enough broadcast audience. The show went dark following its cancellation, but a strange thing happened when the series saw a major resurgence of fan development following the show’s end. Through the sale of DVDs and a growing audience posthumously, ‘Arrested Development’ found an unlikely savior through Netflix, whose streaming service was just starting to blossom.

After a lot of back and forth, what some might have called cat-herding, the fourth season of ‘Arrested Development’ released on Netflix and found itself… struggling with its original audience initially.

While after the credits rolled on the fourth season’s finale, fans felt rewarded, the initial premise of the episodes felt wildly different from the initial three seasons, with a “point of view” theme on repeat throughout it’s entire fourth season. It took fans a few episodes to get used to this, but all things considered, most folks would call it a victory for the show, no matter how small.

But now we’ve been in limbo for several years, with continual rumors popping up that there was going to be a fifth season of ‘Arrested Development.’ Most of the characters have moved on to different projects, and Michael Cera has likely consumed a bazillion drugs rendering him unaware of a possible reboot. But one lone voice keeps howling that there might just be some truth in the rumors.

Show creator Mitch Hurtwitz is now back on the record, reassuring aging fans that he’s confident there will be a fifth season of the series. In his words, reported in an Esquire article, a fifth season is “definitely” going to happen.

From the interview:

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.

As promising as that all sounds, and as much as we want to believe, until we hear official word from Netflix (or any network or streaming service, really), we just aren’t prepared to hold our breath. But here’s hoping.