Jason Bateman teases a murder mystery for Arrested Development’s 5th season

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

It took some time, but after much wrangling of the schedules, a fifth season of Arrested Development was officially greenlit back in May which will find all of the regular cast-members returning. As for what type of misadventures the Bluth family will find themselves getting into, we're not sure, but Jason Bateman recently chatted with Entertainment Weekly Radio to tease that the main story of the season will be the mystery surrounding the death of Lucille 2 (Liza Minnelli).

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.

Jason Bateman added that Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz has a "three-act story" in mind. "The first act was done on the first batch of Netflix episodes [in 2013], and we’re about to do now the second act of that story, and then the act third act presumably will be done if we can all get it together at a later date, maybe in another few years. We’re kind of turning into a Michael Apted Seven Up! thing." One of the common criticisms lobbed at the fourth season of Arrested Development was that too much time was spent on following the stories of the individual characters and not enough on the Bluth family as a whole, but Jason Bateman reassured fans that the cast will be together much more in the upcoming season.

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.

Production on the fifth season of Arrested Development will get underway in a couple of weeks and is expected to debut on Netflix in 2018.