Seven years after being cancelled, the show has been resurrected by Netflix. But why has it retained such a vast army of fans? Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Cera, Tony Hale and other cast members explain why

Now the story of an amazing TV show,

That got cancelled,

And the cast and fans who had no choice,

But to keep the faith that it would one, day come back,

It's ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

Chances are, you are among the majority of people who would read the above paragraph and wonder not just what on earth I am talking about, but why I am saying it in a strange sing-songy tone.

However, you might be among that special – and growing – minority who definitely do understand it and are now sing-songing along to the theme song of a certain TV show that I have scandalously bastardised. If so, you are doubtless squealing with excitement that, after a seven-year wait that has been peppered with raised hopes and broken promises, in less than a week you can see the long-awaited new series of Arrested Development, the finest – in my opinion – sitcom ever produced.

As you can probably ascertain from the above hyperbole – and there will be a lot of hyperbole in this piece, all justified – I am very much part of the minority. I can't remember when I first saw Arrested Development but it has been a rare week (or day) since that I have failed to watch at least three episodes on my now worn-down-to-the-nub box set. That person in the corner barking out catchphrases such as: "I think I've made a huge mistake," "Her?" and, of course, "Come ON!" – no, that's not some teenage boy, that would be me, adult woman me.

Arrested Development is to the US what The Office is to Britain: a small, weird show that came out of nowhere, somehow sneaked onto a major network and influenced many of the best programmes that followed in its wake. It is Modern Family's older, smarter, funnier, weirder, braver and more original brother ("Hermano!" Arrested fans are shouting as one – unlikely catchphrases are a cornerstone of the show), and its first three series, which aired 2003-6, still look miles ahead of most things on TV today.

Way back in 2002, director Ron Howard came up with the idea of a family-based sitcom filmed documentary-style, using handheld cameras and no laugh track (bear in mind that this was just one year after The Office aired in Britain and years before this style descended into cliche in British and American sitcoms). He hired Mitch Hurwitz to write the show and Hurwitz, inspired by the then-recent Enron scandal, came up with the idea of a once wealthy and deeply corrupt family, the Bluths, who are now in self-induced financial dire straits. The main characters are middle brother Michael (Jason Bateman), who is – generally – a good guy and is trying to rescue his family; his nerdy son George Michael (Michael Cera), who is crippled with guilt about his lustful feelings for his cousin, Maeby Funke (Alia Shawkat); Maeby's selfish mother, Lindsay (Portia de Rossi), and her possibly closeted husband, Tobias (David Cross); Michael's oldest brother, Gob, pronounced like the Biblical "Job" (Will Arnett), a magician whose personal uselessness is only exceeded by the crapness of his tricks; Michael's youngest brother, Buster (Tony Hale), who has been babied into permanent ineptitude by their terrifying mother, Lucille (Jessica Walter); and their now convicted and frequently fugitive father, George Senior (Jeffrey Tambor). Then there are the peripheral but essential characters, such as Lucille 2, Buster's occasional girlfriend, played by, of all people, Liza Minnelli, and Barry Zuckercorn (Henry Winkler), the family's useless lawyer, eventually replaced by Bob Loblaw (Scott Baio, who played Winkler's cousin on Happy Days – the show is full of such winks.) Holding the whole shebang together is Ron Howard's dry narration.

Alia Shawkat as Maeby.

This summary barely touches on the brilliance of Arrested Development, and why those of us who love it love it so much. It is a show with a warm heart but a ruthlessly hilarious mind, and the mind always trumps the heart: happy endings are not guaranteed but dark humour definitely is. British TV viewers are relatively used to seeing irredeemably eccentric characters and TV shows that don't condescend to the audience, but on American TV in 2003, this was all wildly subversive.

Too subversive for Fox, it turned out, who – despite the show winning several Emmys – cancelled it in 2006. No, Arrested never got the kind of ratings that other Fox stalwarts such as American Idol attracted (although this wasn't helped by Fox frequently moving the show around the schedule so even the few fans it had could never find it) but, by all reports, the folks in charge never got the programme – it was just too weird. By the time the axe finally fell on Arrested at the end of the third series, the only surprise to the beleaguered cast and crew was that it hadn't fallen sooner.

There have since been frequent rumours of a comeback and maybe even a film, but the fans grew used to disappointment and the show's cult status only grew.

But finally, against all odds, the Bluths are coming back this Sunday, with all the episodes of the new series available at once on Netflix. To celebrate this fact, most of the cast came to London earlier this month and I, of course, behaved with utmost professionalism, causing only one cast member to run away from me in fear of my fangirl ardour. Possibly.

On a rare sunny spring day in London, five of Arrested's main cast members – Jeffrey Tambor, David Cross, Michael Cera, Tony Hale and Alia Shawkat – gather in various hotel rooms in Claridges, all of which looked disconcertingly like Lucille Bluth's baroque apartment. I speak with them in small groups, then all together, then one on one and the dynamics change distinctly and, in many ways, predictably.

"We are all," Hale concedes, "smaller versions of our characters."

Michael Cera as George Michael.

And they really are: on his own Cera is quiet and even nervy. When I ask him about the years 2007–10 when Cera appeared to be ubiquitous, he replies, deeply George Michaelishly: "Well, I enjoyed working. But I don't think anyone wants that kind of attention."

But with Shawkat, whom he describes as one of his closest friends, he comes alive. Shawkat, meanwhile, is the same delightful mix of unfettered bolshiness ("I wanted to prove myself when we got back together [for the fourth series] so was like, hey! I've had drugs! I've had sex!") and insecurity ("When I was 16 and on the show, I hated my body, I was so insecure and used to smoke pot all the time …") that defines Maeby. In a group, Hale is as self-effacing as Buster being terrorised by his mother – but on his own he's a gigglesome, gossipy joy.

Tambor always dominates whatever group he's in, but alone he's solemn and elusive and at one point I find myself chasing him up some stairs just to try to talk to him, as though I were pursuing George Sr through Mexico in the second series. I worry that perhaps I scared him off but Cera and Shawkat assure me there is a definite overlap between Tambor and George Sr: on his very first day on set back in 2003, when he was still a nervous 14-year-old, Cera brought his mother and saw Tambor walking towards them and so he shyly said: "Uh, Jeffrey, this is my mother." "I'm not interested in meeting your fucking mother," Tambor replied and walked all the way to the end of the room before turning around and coming back to kiss her. Similarly, Shawkat recalls the time when she was just 15 and the show lost a SAG award to Desperate Housewives. Tambor turned to her and snarled: "This is all your fault," before finishing his pudding, without winking once. (Tambor, for his part, thinks he's "a lot more like Oscar", George Sr's hippy twin brother, than George Sr.)

"The adults definitely didn't soften things on set. You get a thick skin but it's not a tough place – it's just that some of the stuff they would say was really coarse and extreme," says Cera. (Surprisingly, Arnett isn't the coarsest but rather it is, according to Cera, angel-faced Bateman: "Jason is a complete terror. The things that come out of his mouth!")

Finally, Cross is mouthy and hilarious. He doesn't drop any Tobias-style double entendres ("I just blue myself"), but his words often reveal more than he initially intends. While the rest of the cast offer placating platitudes about how at least Fox kept the show going for three series, Cross tries to do the same but invariably his sentences collapse into still palpable frustration:

"You know, Fox isn't in the business of making great art – they're in the business of making as much money as possible for Rupert Murdoch. Which, of course, is what all of our business should be," he finishes with more than a hint of bite.

Having crossed the Murdoch rubicon, Cross then gleefully recounts the morning in 2003 when they were shooting the pilot:

Jeffrey Tambor as George Senior.

"So I was in make up at 6am and I had this moustache for Tobias. But we get a message that someone – well, I guess you can Google who it was, it was Gail Berman [then the president of entertainment for Fox] – has three rules about men in comedy: no moustaches, no frilly cuffs, no hats. Just the most absurd, arbitrary … Anyway, we went back and forth and eventually they say: 'OK, you can have a moustache, but it can't be bushy.' That was an actual quote!" Inevitably, not only does Tobias have a moustache in the pilot, but he wears frilly cuffs, too, and hats were not far behind.

By contrast, Cross says, Netflix "could not have been more vocal in their appreciation for what we do". And they have lavished a lot more than compliments on the show: not only did they put up its cast members in Claridge's, they held an Arrested Development party in Sketch, one of London's most absurdly overpriced restaurants. (By comparison, when Arrested won one of its Emmys back in 2004, the most Fox could manage was a tiny "Congratulations!" banner of the kind that you get in a party store, and they took it down by the end of the day.)

After Fox shut the show down in 2006, most of the cast members assumed it had been forgotten, only occasionally getting approached by college students. But slowly the show's cult status grew ("It's probably better that Fox didn't give us more seasons as getting cancelled gave us that underdog cult status," says Shawkat, treacherously but also probably correctly.) Now people around the world shout out their characters' catchphrases to them ("In India, while I was meditating – what the fuck!" cries Shawkat). In return for such loyalty, they are all sweetly discreet about plot developments in the fourth series, fearful of spoiling their fans' pleasure.

They all insist that they had such innate trust in Hurwitz that, when he finally confirmed there would be a fourth series, they agreed immediately. With one exception: cautious, nervous Buster, I mean Hale. "So many years had gone by, so many expectations, I didn't know if I could do it ..."

Hale is also now starring in Veep, Armando Iannucci's HBO sitcom, complicating his schedule further: "And Armando and Mitch are so different in their approaches. With Armando, he's so sweet and each show morphs as we film it. Whereas Mitch is like a comic scientist and you don't want to improvise because everything is so precisely worked out."

Ultimately, though, everyone got back on board, but it would have been understandable if the cast had more qualms than the fans about the return. For a start, the scripts were often completed on the fly while filming. Complicating matters further, because all 15 episodes will be available at once Hurwitz has decided to play with the most basic structural principles of a sitcom: instead of the various story arcs concluding at the end of each episode, they will reach through the whole series. This means fans will have to be especially alert at spotting the in-jokes, and patient that the various nonsensical utterances the characters are saying will, at some point, become logical, although that point may not be for several hours.

But Arrested's fans and cast have practice at being patient and putting their faith into Hurwitz's seemingly most deranged ideas:

"From the start it was like, 'OK, now a seal's going to eat your hand and Liza Minnelli's going to be your girlfriend,' and I'd be like, 'OK.' You just ride that wave," shrugs Hale. It's time, at last, to ride that wave again.