The highly anticipated fourth season of Arrested Development will debut in the first half of 2013 exclusively on Netflix, the subscription service announced Friday.

Last month, creator Mitch Hurwitz announced at the New Yorker festival that the cult comedy would return for a fourth season and a movie.

Twentieth Century Fox Television and Imagine Television will produce the show and the entire cast is expected to return, according to reports.

“Arrested Development is one of the finest American comedies in TV history and its return through Netflix is a perfect example of how we are working closely with studios and networks to provide consumers with entertainment they love,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in a statement.

After five years of waiting and wondering, Arrested Development fans can exhale. The Bluths of Orange County, the greatest dysfunctional family ever to grace the small screen, are coming back!

The news was announced Sunday at the New Yorker Festival by the show’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz. And the best news of all, we get both a 4th season AND a movie. Hurwitz guesstimates the new season will air in the Fall of 2012, while lead actor Jason Bateman says it’ll be Spring of 2013.

Obviously, things haven’t been completely ironed out. But Hurwitz and Ron Howard, the producer, director, and narrator of the series, are working on it. Hurtwitz explained some of the impediments:

We don’t completely own the property, there are business people involved and studios and that kind of thing. Just creatively, I have been working on the screenplay for a long time and found that as time went by, there was so much more to the story. In fact, where everyone’s been for five years became a big part of the story. So in working on the screenplay, I found even if I just gave five minutes per character to that back story, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together.

The plan is that the new TV episodes will cover the years that have gone by since the show last aired, and will lead up to the film. More details at the New York Times.