PSA: "Arrested Development" S5 Won't Return to Australian Netflix In March

Australian Netflix won't be getting part two of Arrested Development S5 when the rest of the world does.

In the lead-up to Arrested Development's highly anticipated fifth season release in 2018, a few unexpected things happened.

Jeffrey Tambor (who plays George Bluth Snr.) spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about getting dropped from Transparent following allegations of sexual misconduct (allegations he denies). He also mentioned he'd once yelled at his Arrested Development co-star Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth).

Later, that incident was brought up during a New York Times interview with Tambor and Walter, as well as their fellow AD colleagues Jason Bateman, Tony Hale, David Cross and Alia Shawkat, which resulted in Walter breaking down and the male cast defending Tambor's actions.

It was a real trainwreck, to say the least.

But, perhaps the most unexpected incident for us Australian fans was the discovery that the Netflix-produced fifth season wasn't actually going to be available on local Netflix.

And now that the global release date for the second part of Season 5 (S5.2) has been announced for 15 March, it's more bad news for Aussie Netflix subscribers hoping to get their AD fix.

Netflix has confirmed with Student Edge that Arrested Development S5.2 won't drop on 15 March as it will in the rest world.

This is because, as we reported last year when part one of Season 5 was released, Netflix doesn't actually own the "first-run" Aussie rights to the show despite it (now) being a Netflix production.

Instead, Foxtel has the first-run rights Down Under, which means when a new season of Arrested Development is released in Australia, it's Foxtel, not Netflix, that gets to release it first.

Foxtel has confirmed with us that Season 5.2 will be returning soon to their service, but a date has yet to be confirmed.

Given that last year's premiere date on Foxtel was only a few days after the international Netflix premiere, we're hoping we won't have to wait too long after 15 March.