Fans have been talking about Arrested Development Season 5 pretty much since the moment Season 4 hit Netflix. For the past year or so, we've heard hints that a fifth season of the comedy would eventually be getting off the ground, but this week, series lead Jeffrey Tambor straight-up gave us the most concrete piece of information we've gotten about AD so far, mentioning he's supposed to report to work in January. Here's what he had to say on the daytime show Today.
There's always chatter. My marching orders are to go to work on January.
The year 2017 and the month of January are only a short time away at this point, and Jeffrey Tambor's comments seem to indicate that Arrested Development Season 5 is getting off of the ground sooner rather than later. Of course, he doesn't say that filming is starting in January, just that he's supposed to show up for something Arrested Development related, so it could be a while longer before the show actually moves forward. Fingers crossed its sooner rather than later.
One of the big problems that Arrested Development Season 4 faced was figuring out a way to bring back all of the original cast members, who happen to busy with other projects. Currently, Jeffrey Tambor is on Transparent, Will Arnett has BoJack Horseman and a slew of other projects like The Lego Batman Movie, Tony Hale's on Veep, Portia de Rossi has a gig on Scandal, Jessica Walter's on Archer and the other leads like Jason Bateman, Michael Cera and more have a slew of different film and TV projects in the works. In Season 4, the series actually ended up shooting around the actors' schedules so that different characters would be in different scenes together. The result was a little disjointed but not altogether unpleasant, and we would expect something similar this time around.
As recently as a few months ago, creator Mitch Hurwitz was stating that Season 5 was definitely going to happen at Netflix. The only big detail that needed to be worked out was when. At one point, the show was supposed to come together last January, but since then things have been pushed back indefinitely. Now, Jeffrey Tambor indicated on Today that the coming January (2017) is the real date.
We know Hurwitz already has Season 5---otherwise known as the next batch of episodes---already mapped out, but Netflix has yet to confirm Season 5 has gotten off of the ground. As soon as the details get worked out, hopefully we'll be hearing about them. After all, the subscription streaming service has plenty of money right now to devote to an original comedy like this.
For now, check out what definitely is coming to Netflix with our Netflix TV premiere schedule.
