Siri, play “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel.
All five seasons of Arrested Development are set to leave Netflix on Wednesday, March 15, TVLine has confirmed. (The series’ Netflix landing page warns subscribers that the last day to watch is Tuesday, March 14.)
Arrested Development originally launched on Fox, where it ran for three seasons before its cancellation in 2006. Seven years later, Netflix revived the cult classic for a polarizing fourth season, a Rashomon-style experiment consisting of 15 character-specific episodes that rarely saw the beloved ensemble on screen together. Five years later, ahead of a fifth (and, who are we kidding, final) season, series creator Mitch Hurwitz re-cut Season 4 into 22 interwoven stories that matched the length of the original Fox episodes.
While the Fox seasons are also available to stream on Hulu, Seasons 4 and 5 remain exclusive to Netflix. The original cut of Season 4 received a proper DVD release, but neither the 22-episode “remix” nor the controversy-plagued (and critically reviled) Season 5 have been made anywhere else. As of press time, it is unclear whether those seasons will resurface on another streaming platform. (Perhaps they’ll migrate to FakeBlock?)
The series’ makeshift series finale ended on an extremely bleak note, revealing that Tony Hale’s Buster Bluth did, in fact, kill on-again/off-again girlfriend Lucille Austero (aka Lucille No. 2), before tossing her corpse in a cement wall. And with that, “the story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together,” came to an end.
Are you sorry to see Arrested Development leave Netflix? And would it be so bad if Seasons 4 and 5 went the way of Buster’s left hand? Sound off in Comments.
