I would be down with a short season/one movie with the full cast, I'd even take another season like season 4 (I know I'm one of few, but I believe that was a masterpiece of story telling)
Exactly Matthew McConaghey and Woody Harrelson can film an entire season of an HBO show but Michael Cera is too busy to shoot a half hour sitcom?
I mean, I'm sure Will Arnett is very busy too with Bojack Horseman and Flaked, plus having done the Lego Movie and now doing the Lego Batman movie
Well I will just enjoy more AD in whatever form the producers give and hope it is good but I can't say that I am not optimistic this can be pulled off.
Yeah it's like a lot of y'all forgot just how many important actors were on this show and how many of them went on to do bigger things and are still finding work.
I don't know. I understand that corralling all these actors at one time is difficult but at this point it's been almost 4 years since the last season. I don't see why they couldn't work out some time a year or two in advance. We're going to get a second season of Wet Hot American Summer before Arrested Development season 5, and the people involved in that are pretty much uniformly way more busy than the collective cast of Arrested Development.
They may be busier, but they're (minus Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, and Elizabeth Banks - who aren't really the most prominent characters) cheaper to pay, probably. Also aren't the bulk of the WHAS cast more involved with the actual production than AD? But yeah, I'm sure money is a huge reason.
Netflix has more money than God at this point. Plus the entire budget is basically in paying the actors, it's not like it's an expensive production. And if any of the actors are messing everything up by holding out for more money then that would be really depressing (and I also find that hard to believe, with this group). I sincerely doubt that money is the reason.
Okay, and in those four years since the fourth season, how many of these actors have been working on a tv series with a season each year? Will Arnett, Jeffery Tambor, Jessica Walter, Tony Hale... I mean, I can only imagine that the writing/production process for Arrested Development is so far from consistent at this point than the projects these actors are working on. I'm sure these actors' years have already been planned out since sometime last year. The crew for AD just can't call them up all of a sudden and expect them to comply when they have other tasks consistently at hand.
Another factor is that, in some ways, Netflix has to compete with Amazon for Jeffrey Tambor, who is excelling in (even though I'm not a huge fan of the show itself) what is arguably the role of a lifetime in Transparent.
I'm saying they should have planned this out years in advance back in 2013. Set everything down on paper so that their other obligations would have to be worked around this. They clearly intended to do another season based on how the last one ended. This situation was basically caused by them not committing everyone to a hard date. EDIT: And also, these arguments don't really hold any water anyway because Netflix has clearly been able to make it work on even shorter timelines (again, see Wet Hot American Summer).
I'm rewatching the series for the first time in forever, and I totally forgot about how incredible the lead up to the seal biting off Buster's hand is.
I still think AD has the best pilot of all time. They knew the characters and the tone from the first scene. If you go back and watch the first few episodes of other sitcoms like Friends or Seinfeld, it takes a while for the writers to figure out what works and what doesn't. Totally not the case with AD.