No More Arrested Development After Season 4 ⇒

Greg Bensinger reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

At an investor conference Monday, Chief Executive Reed Hastings said the show would be a “one-off” and “non-repeatable” event for the Los Gatos, Calif., company.

It hasn’t even “aired” yet.

Some questions come to mind: How the hell does Netflix measure success? Or does it just not care? Would another network have killed the prospect of another season before releasing a single episode?

The bigger question, I think, is whether or not Netflix actually has the power to negotiate keeping a show as ambitious and sprawling as Arrested Development in production. Some of the biggest players are movie stars now; do they really want to keep on making a direct-to-video sitcom?1

I’m getting the feeling 2013’s original content rollout from Netflix is less “the future” and more, in the words of Hastings, a “one-off.”


  1. What would you call it? ↩︎