‘Arrested Development’ season 5 still being discussed; negotiations with cast ongoing

We don’t think that there is any question that there is a demand out there for a fifth season of “Arrested Development.” It’s a show so good, we binge-watched the first four seasons in about a month just this past year. It’s hilarious, irreverent, biting, and even at times heartfelt for certain characters. It’s unfortunately also a show that is very complicated to film.

Let’s try to lay out the reasons why, starting of course with scheduling. Jason Bateman’s a busy movie guy these days, Portia de Rossi is on “Scandal,” Will Arnett has two separate projects with Netflix already, Tony Hale has “Veep,” and Jeffrey Tambor is winning all sorts of awards for his role on “Transparent.” Speaking to Deadline, creator Mitch Hurwitz hopes to start production relatively soon on new episodes, but there are negotiations still taking place with the cast to determine who is going to be available to film some episodes. We feel like structurally, we’ll probably see something similar to season 4 so that everyone’s schedules can be balanced out properly.

As for the content, there are apparently some ideas that Hurwitz had that have already been taken by real-life headlines. For example, Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” and other true-crime stories have already supplanted some of the ideas that the show had for the Buster story; he was arrested in season 4 for the murder of Lucille 2. Meanwhile, there was an idea revolving around having Mexicans pay for a wall across the border, but this was taken by Donald Trump instead during the Presidential election.

We ultimately imagine that the show will be as hilarious as ever, but we still figure that we’ll be lucky to get season 5 in late 2016. It seems like a more reasonable estimate to say that we’ll get another batch of Bluth family adventures in the new year.

For now, stay tuned; we’ll have some other updates as they start to become available!