The announcement has been made, the heroic return of Arrested Development is scheduled for May 26th on Netflix! In case you were wondering, this is a huge tiny deal, because not only has a show been resurrected from premature death, it’s being resurrected in a completely different fashion than any other show. The premier on Netflix will include 15 episodes on the streaming service, and with the coming holiday weekend, true fans will have plenty of time to watch and re-watch the new series episodes over the course of a long weekend.
When the show ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006, it had a loyal following, and it won an Emmy for best comedy, but it never got the ratings they needed to stay on the air. Once Arrested Development hit the DVD world, the popularity sky rocketed, and even more so once the old series was put on Netflix. The episodes will now be crafted for the on-demand generation, and creator Mitch Hurwitz has apparently decided to even formulate the show around that notion. Since scheduling was an issue also, many of the episodes will feature a partition of the cast, rather than all of them at once, and follow more specific stories for each. When all put together as one mass series available right away on Netflix, fans will be able to access each episode whenever they want.
When the news of this reboot of the series hit the papers and the blogs, there was a significant buzz about doing a movie, which hasn’t completely fizzled yet. The original idea was to get all the characters back for a full-length movie, even hinting to that during the last episode shown in 2006. The next hint for a movie came when we heard about the new episodes being written, as some said they were going to be small setups for an upcoming movie or just a way to revamp interest before putting out the new movie. Either way, now that we know we’re going to see brand new episodes, our greed takes over yet again for Arrested Development. What more will we see after the new episodes on Netflix? Can we count on a movie? Or maybe even another installment of episodes? It’ll be interesting to see first how people react to the new episodes, especially with such high expectations, and then how much demand there will be for more.