The Mr. Manager of Television has heard our prayers, and now is the time to rejoice! We’ve all been hoping that the ground breaking cult classic Arrested Development would take  a trip from the small screen to the silver screen, but we’re about to get more Bluth family updates than we ever dreamed of. It was announced this Sunday at The New Yorker Festival that the show is also set to return to the airwaves for another season! “It’s true. We will do 10 episodes and the movie,” tweeted series hero Jason Bateman. “Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early ’13. VERY excited!” All of the original cast is slated to return, including Michael Cera, Will Arnett, Portia De Rossi and David Cross.

Although the show was cancelled  amid much controversy in 2006, the legend (and fan base) of the show has continued to grow ever since. Though nearly all of the cast has gone on to Hollywood mega-fame, devotees of all ages have been clamoring for a reunion of any kind. Yes, Arrested Development is like the Beatles of television sitcoms. There has been talk of a movie for years, but the details always proved impossibly hard to nail down. Series creator Mitch Hurwitz explained that the problems were less about actor involvement, and more about intellectual copyright. “We don’t completely own the property,” he told festival attendees yesterday. “There are business people and studios and that kind of thing.”

But despite the  problems in the business end, Hurwitz says that the juices have been flowing creatively. “I’ve been working on the screenplay for a long time,” he says, “and I found that as time went by there was so much more to the story.” To fill audiences in on what the family has been doing in the five years since we’ve seen them, he aims give each character an episode in which to dive into their backstory. This “limited series” will then lead into the feature film. We’re so excited, we think we just blue ourselves.

[Photo: Fox]