fox broadcasting via cbs news

Following Netflix’s online streaming debut of House of Cards (a remake of an acclaimed UK TV series), its even more highly anticipated revival of Arrested Development will show up in May.

As with House of Cards, all 14 episodes (up from an original order of 10) will show up on the service’s menu screens on the same day. All the producers say about the content is that each episode will focus on a different character.

It’s been seven years since the critically-beloved, low-rated sitcom ended its original 2.5-year run on Fox. Fans all have their ideas on what they want to have happened to the highly dysfunctional Bluth family. Here’s mine:

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• Michael Bluth managed to get the family’s housing-development company back in the black, ready to explode with a dozen new projects. Then came the housing crash. Michael’s been putting out fires and juggling debts around ever since, to absolutely no help from his relatives. Year by year, his notion of himself as the family’s moral compass has been challenged by each sleazy move he must make to keep the company alive.
• Michael’s son George-Michael did end up in a relationship with his cousin-by-adoption Maeby. But it ended (or rather paused) awkwardly, leaving plenty of unspoken tensions and desires to reunite among both parties.
• Maeby, meanwhile, lost her Hollywood studio gig for good when studio bosses decided she was now too old to gauge the teenage audience. All washed up at 18. A series of short-lived would-be careers has followed.
• Family matriarch Lucille, the real instigator of the Bluth Company’s funny-money crimes, has been in and out of jail, then engaged in numerous convoluted projects to try to stay out, including the attempted blackmail of a judge.
• Lucille’s sometimes-estranged husband George Sr. believes himself to still be on the run from the law. Only Lucille knows all charges against him have been dropped, and she “hasn’t found the right time” yet to tell him.
• George’s brother Oscar has been in and out of Lucille’s bed (and good graces) several times.
• Eldest son G.O.B. finally put his smarmy magician’s banter to productive use, hosting infomercials for a series of products that all became recalled after horrid consumer accidents.
• Adopted daughter Lindsay (Maeby’s mom) has vacillated between total estrangement from the Bluths and crawling back pleading for financial and other favors.
• Maeby’s sometime husband Tobias Fünke wrote one more self-help book. In it, he proclaimed himself to be a “g-asexual.” He loved the outrageousness and camaraderie of the gay world, he explained, but hated the sight of men’s privates—including his own. The book wasn’t a hit; unsold copies litter every space where any Bluth family member lives or works.
• Younger Bluth son Buster got his severed hand reattached. Ever since, though, he’s suffered from “phantom non-pains,” expecting the hand to not be there when it is.
• Korean adopted son Annyong, the secret mastermind behind the legal and other machinations against the Bluths, hasn’t been caught yet.

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Meanwhile, one Helen Rittelmeyer at FirstThings.com makes a good case that Arrested Development could be an uncredited remake of The Brothers Karamazov!