Season 5 of Arrested Development is officially a go at Netflix, and in a round of interviews this week, Jason Bateman revealed a few details about what we can expect in the next batch of episodes. Speaking to SiriusXM’s EW Radio, Bateman said that the new season will center around the Lucille Austero murder mystery:
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. 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.
Bateman also confirmed that, unlike last season, all of the cast will be together for season 5:
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. 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.
Bateman went a little further with The Daily Beast, revealing that the show will definitely be leaning in to its striking similarities to the Trump era:
None of that is lost on [creator] Mitch Hurwitz. He’s aware of all of that stuff. And he and his writing staff have been in a cave for the last two or three months crafting these episodes, and they’re going to lean into a lot of that [Trump] stuff for sure. They can’t wait.
As for timing, the new season is expected to debut sometime next year, and Bateman told Collider that shooting begins “in a couple of weeks.”
