Netflix’s fourth season of Arrested Development was, by all accounts, a total slog. The season’s interlocking, character-specific episodes were supposed to come together to tell a single story from multiple angles, but it wound up feeling more like trying to read a choose-your-own-adventure novel from cover to cover. Now, it seems like even show creator Mitch Hurwitz realized he made a huge mistake.
On Tuesday, Hurwitz announced that he had recut all the footage from season four into more traditional, chronological episodes—basically, that he untangled the entire narrative mess of season four and tried to hammer it out into something that actually feels like Arrested Development.
“The original season four of Arrested Development on Netflix, as some of you know, experimented with a Rashomon-style of storytelling—with each episode dedicated to the adventure of one member of the Bluth family,” Hurwitz wrote in a statement.
But as he was waiting to start production on the show’s upcoming fifth season, Hurwitz decided to take a stab at “shuffling the content from 15 individualized stories” from season four into “22 interwoven stories” in order “to see if new jokes and a new perspective would emerge from a remix that features all the Bluths in every episode, and where the simultaneity of the story plays out chronologically.”
It also, presumably, would give fans a chance to get caught up with the show before the new season drops, without anyone having to suffer through the original version of season four again.
The remixed season, which Hurwitz has dubbed Fateful Consequences, is set to drop on Netflix this Friday, in honor of the Bluths’ made-up holiday, Cinco de Cuatro. “I’m really excited about the final result,” Hurwitz continued. “It’s funny in a whole new way, and I believe it creates a really entertaining and hilarious new experience.”
Hurwitz also promised that the long-awaited new season of Arrested Development is coming “real soon,” meaning that Henry Winkler was probably right when he told Decider last week that the murder mystery season is due out in “midsummer.” Between these two new seasons and that Tobias Fünke cameo in Avengers: Infinity War, we’re in for a Bluth-filled next few months.
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‘Arrested Development’ Creator Thankfully Recut His Mess of a Fourth Season
By Lauren Messman
May 1, 2018 at 01:25PM
via VICE https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxy5x/arrested-development-mitch-hurwitz-netflix-recut-season-four-vgtrn