Turn off your phone (or unhook the landline if you still have one of those), book your day off work, put on jogging pants, stock up on snacks and clear your schedule — new episodes of “Arrested Development” finally land on May 26th on Netflix. And oh yeah, that’s Memorial Day weekend, so you’ll have that Monday handy to rest or watch them all over again.
You’ll notice we held off on calling it season four, if only because Jason Bateman recently said, “It is not season four. It got misbranded or mislabeled way, way, way back when,” but for all intents and purposes, it pretty much is. One more thing: it’s now official that there will be an awesome 15 new episodes to soak up and watch over and over again to get all the jokes that you might miss the first time out.
The biggest change for fans here may be the format, with each episode more or less focusing on a single character as the story follows “what happens in 2006 as the Bluths fled from the law on the Queen Mary,” creator and writer Mitch Hurwitz has said. However, we can expect to see the overlapping, dense style that has become the show’s trademark. And there will be plenty of guests to help out as well, with Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Isla Fisher, Terry Crews, Conan O’Brien, Ben Stiller and John Slattery all slated to appear.
Of course, all of this is in promise of the eventual movie, with the episodes serving as the “first act” of sorts, though there is no deal in place for that just yet (and David Cross has doubts about it happening at all). And that’s not to mention Netflix’s desire to have even more “Arrested Development” episodes on their slate in the future, even as difficult as scheduling proved to be to get this batch made.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 15 episodes. May 26th. 12:01 PST. Be there. [Vulture]