Arrested Development is coming back for a fifth season next year

The Bluths are returning to our tiny streaming screens. Arrested Development is coming back for a fifth season, set to premiere at approximately this exact same time next year. Producer Brian Grazer, who helped bring Arrested Development into being way back when it was an overlooked stepchild on Fox, announced back in April that the show would indeed get a fifth season.

Now, it seems, that fifth season is coming a tad sooner than we expected. Grazer was a recent guest on The Adam Carolla Show where he confirmed two glorious things: One, that the second season will feature a hefty seventeen episodes, more than any Arrested Development season since the second. And two, that the new episodes will begin filming in January. As in, just six months and Christmas away from right this very minute.

Production is scheduled to begin on January 1, but you know that that is a load of hogwash. No one begins work on a multi-million dollar production the morning after New Year’s Eve. Nonetheless, in Grazer’s own words, “Netflix is determined to do more episodes, so we’re going to do more episodes.” And we can expect them about “four months after [filming begins].”

Show creator and executive producer and overall Arrested Development mastermind Mitchell Hurwitz is also on board, as is the entire main cast. One thing we don’t know yet is whether the cast is all available at the exact same time. Since basically everyone who was on the show during seasons one through three became a star after Arrested Development was canceled, it was too expensive to have them all available for the duration of season four’s shoot. Which is why season four is a jagged, beautiful monster, featuring only one main cast member per episode.

In any case: we have plenty of time to catch up with that monster between over the next year.

(Photo credits: Entertainment Weekly)