‘Arrested Development’ Season Five Will Be Some Sort Of Donald Trump Meets ‘Making A Murderer’ Thing

There’s been an interesting development with Arrested Development: when it finally returns to Netflix with season five, it’ll echo current American politics — inside a serialised murder mystery.

In a weird twist of life imitating art imitating life, Lindsay Bluth’s quest to build a wall to “keep Mexicans out” and win the Republican ticket for office in season four materialised almost to a T in the seemingly unstoppable train-wreck that is presidential candidate Donald Trump; now, after the political events of last year, series creator Mitch Hurwitz has decided to turn the tables, and base Lindsay’s story on Trump’s real life one.

I’ll just let that digest for a moment.

The next bit of season four that’s been fed a cocktail of topical pop culture steroids, is Buster’s arrest over Lucille Austero’s murder. According to Deadline, Hurwitz had already mapped out the idea of a murder mystery-styled season five before the likes of Serial and The Jinx, but now that the genre has taken off, he’s going all Making a Murderer, à la the Bluth family.

Hurwitz had also wanted to eventually reveal Jeffrey Tambor’s character, George, as transgender, apparently long before Tambor’s performance in the award-winning Transparent. Considering how serious the plight of trans people is — the community’s high rates of depression and suicide, as well as discrimination and abuse — and the immense pressure, and inevitable criticism, Tambor faced in representing it, scrapping that storyline was probably a good call.

I can’t imagine the Bluths being too sensitive with that one.

Due to ongoing casting schedule complications, and the timeliness of the news-based storylines, Hurwitz hasn’t actually started writing the script yet. But his goal is to release Arrested Development season five before the presidential election in November. Which, okay.