Season 5 of Arrested Development will plunk the Bluth family and their assorted hangers-on into a murder mystery with no shortage of suspects. At least, that’s the vision held by series mastermind Mitch Hurwitz according to Jason Bateman.
Appearing on EW Radio, the actor shared that the mysterious circumstances surrounding business titan Lucille II being snuffed out at the end of season 4 (or was she?) will be what their next season will revolve around.
“The central spine of that story of is the death of Liza Minnelli’s character, and a bit of whodunit, who may have done it, who had something to do with it,” he explained. “That’s sort of a central thread around which [creator Mitch Hurwitz] is going to braid in all the colorful plot complications that he knows how to do.”
What’s not to like about that? There’s intrigue, backstabbing and all the more reason to pay attention to the roughly 350 jokes crammed into each frame. There could be clues in there, you know. Speaking of family interaction, Arrested Development has learned its lesson from its Netflix debut season and is placing a premium on having the cast intermingling throughout the whole affair.
“Because of certain limitations we had with actors’ schedules and exclusivities to other shows, and budgetary constraints, [Hurwitz] had to pivot a bit off of that,” said Bateman of the last outing. “And also it was an interesting thing for him to do because he was embracing the interface of Netflix, which was fairly new at the time in original programming, and wanted to be able to basically have you click out of one episode and click into somebody else’s episode and see a different view point on this simultaneous action. Ultimately, editorially, it didn’t really come together as well as he wanted it to, and then he had to dictate an order of watching, and it ended up being a little bit more complicated than I think one intended. But we’re still very proud of those episodes obviously — and really excited that we get to be together in these.”
The finished product will arrive in all its streaming glory on Netflix in 2018.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
