There’s always money in the banana stand. Jason Bateman, Michael Cera and more rounded out the dysfunctional — yet beloved — Bluth family across five seasons of Arrested Development.
The comedy originally aired on Fox from 2003 to 2006. Amid rumors that the series would be moving to Showtime, creator Mitchell Hurwitz noted he was “more worried about letting down the fans in terms of the quality of the show dropping” than he was about the series being picked up for another season.
“I had taken it as far as I felt I could as a series,” he said in a 2006 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I told the story I wanted to tell, and we were getting to a point where I think a lot of the actors were ready to move on. … If there’s a way to continue this in a form that’s not weekly episodic series television, I’d be up for it.”
Six years after its cancellation, season 4 of Arrested Development began production. New episodes were released on Netflix in 2013, with the first half of season 5 hitting the streaming platform in late 2018. The series came to an end in 2019.
“It’s very surreal doing a job for 15 years,” Alia Shawkat, who played Maeby Fünke in all five seasons, told The New York Times during a roundtable with the cast in 2018. “Especially transitioning from a child into an adult. When we finished [in 2006], I was 18, and I didn’t work for a little while because… I was like, ‘This is just a bad version of an angsty teen.’ I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’”
Returning to the Bluth family for the later seasons wasn’t a challenge for Jessica Walter. “Lucille is in my DNA now,” the late actress, who died in March 2021, told the outlet at the time.
The Bluths may not have been the picture-perfect family, but behind the scenes, the cast felt like one.
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“From the first moment that we all worked together, we got a sense that there was a chemistry and that there was something about this group of people that worked,” Will Arnett said of his costars. “Through the good, and the bad, and the difficult, and the highs of winning the Emmy, when we all stood on that stage in 2004, there is something that drives us together. And I can tell you from my own personal experience … these are people that I enjoy being with and creating with.”
Scroll down to see where the cast of Arrested Development is now:
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