Arrested Development type TV Show network Fox

Netflix

Ron Howard is back in the booth for the Bluths. The executive producer has returned to lend his voice to the narration of Arrested Development season 5, which was officially announced for Netflix last May after months of speculation.

“For my birthday this morning I was back at the mic for the ‘Next…#ArrestedDevelopment,'” Howard, who’s been busy at work on Solo: A Star Wars Story, tweeted with a photo from the sound booth.

Fans can also spot some of his opening lines for the season 5 premiere, which begins with, “Michael Bluth has been away…”

Jason Bateman returns to his role as the one Bluth son “who had no choice but to keep them all together.” He teased of the plot during an interview on EW Radio, “The central spine of that story of is the death of Liza Minnelli’s character, and a bit of whodunit, who may have done it, who had something to do with it. That’s sort of a central thread around which [creator Mitch Hurwitz] is going to braid in all the colorful plot complications that he knows how to do.”

We’ve also seen glimpses from the production of Lucille’s (Jessica Walter) home and Tony Hale’s (Buster) reunion with the Bluth matriarch.

While season 4 featured separate story lines for each of the main Bluth characters, due to the schedules of the actors, Bateman also clarified that season 5 will see them all interacting together again.

“It was an interesting thing for him to do because he was embracing the interface of Netflix, which was fairly new at the time in original programming, and wanted to be able to basically have you click out of one episode and click into somebody else’s episode and see a different view point on this simultaneous action,” he said. “Ultimately, editorially, it didn’t really come together as well as he wanted it to, and then he had to dictate an order of watching, and it ended up being a little bit more complicated than I think one intended. But we’re still very proud of those episodes obviously — and really excited that we get to be together in these.”

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