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'Arrested Development' cast on board for another Netflix season

A day after a Netflix exec says a new season of the cult TV comedy is "just a matter of when," actor Will Arnett confirms the cast wants to do it.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
Lance Whitney
2 min read

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"Arrested Development" looks like it'll be back for another season on Netflix. Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET

Fans of cult classic TV comedy "Arrested Development" can look forward to another new season via Netflix, though exactly when isn't clear.

On the "Today" show Thursday morning, actor Will Arnett, who plays Gob on the series, said that the cast is going to reunite to do a fifth season.

"We are going to do more 'Arrested Development'," Arnett told Carson Daly during the interview (which you can catch at the 4:10 point in the 5:07-minute clip). "Ted Sarandos and Netflix kind of let the cat out of the bag on that one. It's something we all want to do so we're excited."

On Wednesday, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos hinted that "Arrested Development" fans could expect another season of the show and said "it's just a matter of when." Arnett's comment on the "Today" show seems to confirm that another season is being planned, though whether it's a done deal is unknown.

Debuting on Fox in 2003, "Arrested Development" was another one of those classic shows that seemingly didn't do well enough in the ratings, prompting the network to cancel it in 2006. The first three seasons scored well among Netflix streaming viewers, one of the reasons the show was brought back to life for a fourth season last year. However, that fourth season garnered decidedly mixed reviews. Due to challenges in getting the entire cast back together for every episode, the season instead offered individual episodes that highlighted only one, two, or three characters at the most. Partly as a result, the show lost some of the quirkiness that was always in supply when the entire family was together.

The challenge for show producer Mitch Hurwitz will be to see if he can bring back the appeal of the first three seasons by featuring all or most of the entire cast for each episode. That may not be easy because actors such as Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Jeffrey Tambor, and Michael Cera are typically tied up with other projects over the time it takes to film even just a season of 15 episodes.

At the very least, Hurtwitz will certainly want to take a different approach for the fifth season than he did for the fourth, which turned off many fans with its slow and sometimes confusing storylines.

Sarandos himself admitted that it was a "fair criticism" that "the cast didn't appear on screen often enough together" during the fourth season. So if Netflix has actually ordered a fifth season of the show, the odds are pretty fair that the new season will find some way to recapture the old magic for diehard fans.

[Via Mashable]