Mitch Hurwitz is still confident that another season of Arrested Development will happen
Arrested Development’s original run ended in 2006, meaning there’s been a solid decade of rumors about the possibility of the show coming back. Of course, the show did briefly come back in 2013 with a weirdly structured fourth season on Netflix, but talk of the show coming back again started almost as soon as everybody finished binge-watching those episodes. These days, someone involved with the show pops up every few months to say that a fifth season is totally going to happen someday, but nothing ever gets announced.
Thankfully, today officially marks the “few months” point from the last time we heard about Arrested Development, and series creator Mitch Hurwitz is the latest member of the show’s crew to say that a fifth season is totally going to happen someday. This comes from an interview that Hurwtiz did with Esquire, and though the main focus of the chat was Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite (which Hurwitz co-created), things did circle around to Arrested Development eventually. Specifically, Hurwitz says that a fifth season is “definitely going to happen,” but it’s just a matter of “making it happen.” He says “the actors want to do it, the studio wants to do it, Netflix wants to do it,” and he wants to do it, especially because he and the writers “have a great story to tell.”
As for what that story will be, Hurwitz confirms a rumor from earlier this year that he wanted to do a serialized murder mystery, but it sounds like that might not be part of the plan anymore. He also wanted to do some stuff satirizing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, with a candidate purposefully trying to self-destruct while inadvertently becoming more popular in the process, but since the show won’t be able to hit Netflix before the election, it sounds like that might not happen either. Some things are happening though, like the new edit of the fourth season that we reported on in January of 2015. Hurwitz says they recut the episodes and re-recorded some of Ron Howard’s narration so the season could air on normal TV, and he says he hopes they’ll “find a place to air those.”