Mitch Hurwitz Says 'Arrested Development' Season 5 Still Has A Chance Of Existing Someday

Arrested Development season 4 arrived on Netflix nearly three years ago and the jury is still out on whether or not the return of the Bluth family was a triumph, a debacle, or something in-between. Fans remain divided and bringing up a potential fifth season of the beloved show is sure to inspire a lively debate in the right crowd.

One of the biggest cheerleaders in the pro-season five camp is, naturally, series creator Mitch Hurwitz, who started banging this particular drum shortly after the fourth season and never really wavered. Arrested Development season 5 would be a pain in the rear end to make, but he says he's still working to make it a reality.

Although Hurwitz sat down with Esquire to talk about his new Netflix series, Lady Dynamite, the conversation eventually shifted to the future of Arrested Development. Hurwitz was pretty honest about what's keeping it from happening – the entire cast has been scattered to the winds and getting them all back together is far easier said than done. Plus, season four accidentally commented on some rather controversial current events years in advance and he'd like to capitalize on that:

I'm always trying to move forward with that project regardless of what else is going on in my life. One of the challenges has been a big studio owns it and they don't make TV this way typically. They sign actors for multiple years of a show, and then they shoot. We'll get half of the actors available and we won't quite commit to making the deal, then we'll lose the other half of the actors. I spent some time in the writers room developing an outline for the next season or seasons if we're able to make a deal. I'm trying very hard to get it done because we have a great story to tell. The clock is ticking. We were putting up a wall before Trump was. There were so many things like that. We had a political race that was going to continue in the fifth season. A lot of people thought what Trump was doing was the more they try to self destruct because they don't want office, the more the crowd gathers around them. Which was a viable theory about Trump.

The biggest problem with season four was how obvious it was that the production often couldn't get certain actors in the same room at the same time. The bulk of the season followed individual characters on their own isolated stories, where they were usually completely separate from the rest of the ensemble. While often funny, the vicious banter and group dynamics that defined the show in its original run were often missing. If season five does come together (and I hope it does), I hope they manage to assemble the entire cast at once, even though that is akin to herding cats.

Hurwitz went on to bemoan a number of missed opportunities, namely the popular shows they could have been riffing on in the past few years:

We were also building to a murder mystery and we were laying all these clues, and it was before there was this sudden interest in true crime with Fred Durst, Making a Murderer, and OJ. And there were so many OJ references in the fourth season. We even had Gob find a perfectly good OJ Simpson in the dumpster behind the wax museum. He was, like, driving around with this OJ Simpson and that was going to fit into the murder plot. But we'll find new things. I'm trying, man.

Interestingly, Hurwitz also mentions that the fourth season has been recut into 22 shorter episodes, which would make them easier to air on regular television, should the need ever arise. Arrested Development may be in limbo, but the man responsible for it isn't remaining idle.