It looks like another Netflix season of Arrested Development may be in the future. Brian Grazer, Arrested Development producer and season 4 cameo-maker, revealed to Bloomberg Television in an interview yesterday that there have been talks with Netflix to make a fifth season. “We’re in conversations with them to do another season,” Grazer said. “They are interested in doing that. Mitch is ready to do it and so are the actors, so we’re very excited about it.” News of Netflix officially being in talks for another season comes after the company’s CEO Reed Hastings told CNBC in May that he was happy with the results of season 4 and is interested in another season of the show. “If the talent were willing to do more, and interested in that, I’m sure we would be willing,” Hastings was quoted as saying.
Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz has been talking about following season 4 up with a movie even before production began, but that plan has apparently changed to doing another season. “I would say that I’m more interested in telling the ongoing saga of this family than working out a particular strategy for how to do it,” Hurwitz explained in a Reddit Q&A in June. Hurwitz also said season 5 will feature the whole Bluth family together more, which has been one of the chief complaints fans had with season 4:
For the 5th season, it would DEFINITELY be about the family all together. That was always the design. The idea was originally to have them even together LESS for Season 4 – it really was going to be basically 9 stories (like the Salinger collection) that had nothing to do with one another, and just showed everybody’s life, so that everybody’s life could get to a point of peril, and then the family could truly have no choice but to get back together for the next iteration.
Hopefully, these season 5 negotiations are quick and we don’t have to wait through another six years of will they/won’t they like we did in between seasons 3 and 4.
Here’s Grazer talking about Arrested Development on Bloomberg News: