The fifth season of Arrested Development is on the brink of becoming a reality. On Wednesday, executive producer Brian Grazer revealed negotiations with the cast have reached their final stages, and that a deal to produce Arrested Development Season 5 for Netflix will likely be reached soon.
Grazer told Deadline, “I think we found a way to create the compensation structure for all the actors and create a work matrix so they can still make movies and do other things and it will all integrate. So we are really close — I think within a couple of weeks at the most.”
Grazer didn’t reveal any information about the potential storyline of Season 5, though his mention of a “work matrix” seems to be an encouraging acknowledgement of a major shortcoming of Season 4: the fact that the cast was rarely able to film together at the same time, leading to more single-character episodes. The Bluth family is funnier as a group than one-on-one, and hopefully Season 5 will see them sharing more scenes together.
Even so, there were several other reasons why Season 4 wasn’t so great. For one, Michael seemed to transform from merely thoughtless to actively rotten, and the social commentary about drug use, politics and the 2008 financial crisis often felt ham-fisted.
What kind of storylines might we expect from a fifth season of Arrested Development? Back in January 2016, series creator Mitch Hurwitz told Deadline the story would take the form of a serialized murder mystery, bringing together elements of the Netflix phenomenon Making a Murderer with the outlandish spectacle of the recent presidential campaign. Given that Season 4 saw candidate Lindsay Bluth pledging to build a wall between Orange County and Mexico, it seems awfully likely Season 5 will take a satirical view of Donald Trump’s election and presidency. Whether or not that's a good idea, or the new Netflix episodes will pull it off well, remains to be seen.
What would you like to see in Season 5 of Arrested Development? Would you like to see a Season 5 at all? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
