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‘Arrested Development,’ With the Whole Bluth Family, Will Return in 2018
The Bluths are reuniting again.
Arrested Development, the cult-classic comedy, is returning with its entire regular cast for a fifth season in 2018, Netflix confirmed on Wednesday. It will be 12 years after Fox canceled the show, and five years after Netflix revived it for a long-awaited fourth season.
“In talks with Netflix we all felt that stories about a narcissistic, erratically behaving family in the building business — and their desperate abuses of power — are really underrepresented on TV these days,” Mitchell Hurwitz, the series creator, said in a statement.
The fifth season will get the whole family back together: Michael, George Michael, George Bluth Sr., Lucille, Gob, Buster, Lindsay, Tobias and Maeby (played by Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter, Will Arnett, Tony Hale, Portia de Rossi, David Cross and Alia Shawkat).
Netflix did not say how many episodes would be in the new season, or if they would all be released at once, as Netflix typically does with its TV series.
The show received critical acclaim but less-than-stellar ratings over three years on Fox between 2003 and 2006. It always enjoyed hearty enthusiasm on the internet, where reaction GIFs and in-jokes have scarcely receded more than a decade later.
Fans begged for a Bluth reunion, and Netflix complied, creating a fourth season with 15 episodes that were released all at once in 2013.
But that revival largely failed to meet sky-high expectations. While the season has its defenders, many fans and critics thought it lacked the charm of the original three seasons.
“Everything feels slowed down and dragged out at the same time that it feels forced and overly complicated,” Mike Hale wrote in The New York Times.
“It wasn’t terrible, but it was more forced than funny,” one Times reader wrote.
The season was complicated by scheduling difficulties, with many of the actors and actresses bound by other film and TV obligations. There were few of the full-family gatherings where their chemistry and absurd expressions of love, like chicken dances, emerged.
“Season Four marked the first foray by Netflix into original comedy programming and this time, the Bluths will collectively be spending more quality time with their millions of fans around the world,” Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, said in a statement.
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