The murmurs of another Netflix season of Arrested Development are starting to get louder and louder: Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Entertainment and AD executive producer, told Bloomberg TV that Netflix is currently in talks to start work on a fifth season.
"We were really excited that it came back and that people were able to watch it all at once," Grazer says in the interview above. "We're in conversations with [Netflix] to do another season; they are interested, Netflix, in doing that; Mitch [Hurwitz] is ready to do it, and so are the actors."
Shortly after the premiere of the 4th season, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings went back on wary earlier statements that the season would be a one-off, noting that the company would be interested in doing a fifth season of AD: “Arrested is unique, because that’s really up to the talent. If the talent were willing to do more, and interested in that, I”m sure we would be willing.”
And in a Reddit AMA last month, Hurwitz once again explained how season 4—in which most of the family was purposefully cut off from each other, both for storytelling and scheduling purposes—was always meant as Act 1 of a longer story. But while he previously has refered to Act 2 and 3 as the long-gestating AD film, he referred to it as season 5 this time:
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.
It seems maybe Hurwitz finally gets what Maeby said in her season 4 POV episode ("Senioritis"): maybe AD really does work better as a TV show.
