The Age of Netflix

by Cory Barker

  In Netflix’s case, the investment in original programming can be understood through the history of the company’s content distribution model, when it ceased to be just an online rental service and it started working as an on-demand streaming platform. Two initial challenges presented themselves to Netflix in this transition period in 2007: licensing and the restriction of content distribution windows. According to Sarandos, the absence of a first-sale doctrine to the streaming market demanded a reconfiguration in the licensing of content distribution agreements, particularly with television content.13 The first-sale doctrine allows a company to purchase a large collection of movies and television series as physical media and distribute these products indefinitely, since the copyright holders of such products do not have a perpetual license on them. That is, while the physical integrity of DVDs is preserved, the company does not need to pay again for the right to rent or resell the product. In the streaming market, on the other hand, the companies need to ensure a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) television right, which must be renewed constantly, in a competitive dynamic with other SVOD players. According to Sarandos, such negotiations for television content become progressively more complex, since “every network is interested in holding, withholding, buying, or blocking SVOD rights as a way to create an atmosphere for their own VOD services.”14

  One major challenge regarding distribution windowing came from established agreements among Hollywood studios and cable channels, both premium and basic. These longstanding agreements gave cable channels exclusive first rights to major releases for a period of nine years after the DVD release. Traditional windowing deals like these initially affected the volume of content offered by Netflix’s online streaming service, but did not prevent the company’s investment in the sector. Although Netflix’s still offered physical DVD rentals, subscribers embraced online streaming; by October 2008, estimates showed that 10 to 20 percent of the 8.4 million Netflix’s subscribers used the online service regularly.15

  Simultaneously, changes in licensing agreements began to give way to Netflix’s advancement in the market. The company negotiated the distribution of CBS Television Network and Disney-ABC Television Group series in September 2008, ensuring the rights to TV programs such as CSI: (2000–2015), NCIS (2003–), Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), and Lost (2004–2010). The following month, a licensing agreement with premium cable channel Starz helped reduce the distribution window of Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures films from nine years to just six months.16 Exclusive agreements with production companies such as Relativity Media, Open Roads, and New Image helped prevent the content from going to competitors such as HBO and Showtime. Two years later, in a nearly $2 billion bet, Netflix struck a deal directly with three major Hollywood studios: Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate, and MGM.17

  The most important position taken by Sarandos, however, was the investment in a television content distribution window a year after the season originally aired, or the season-after model. Unlike the day-after episodes available on iTunes and traditional syndication agreements, which are generally negotiated after five full seasons, the season-after model created a distribution alternative for broadcast and cable. According to Sarandos,

  [cable channels] can’t really syndicate their shows to other cable channels, and most of the content is so serialized that it’s difficult to syndicate at all. We secured exclusive rights to Mad Men [2007–2015] partially because we outbid everybody else, but mostly because nobody else wanted it. Because we can get more viewing for that show than anyone else, we can pay more for it than anyone else.18

  The available options of such content, however, are restricted. According to Sarandos, highly serialized offerings like Mad Men, Breaking Bad (2008–2013), and Sons of Anarchy (2008–2014), which draw new subscribers to Netflix, are not among the main investments of broadcast networks, mainly because they are as expensive as they are serialized, and therefore and perceived to be difficult to monetize. Meanwhile, pay cable channels such as HBO and Showtime have responded by developing their own subscription streaming services and resisting negotiations with Netflix—a company whose investment in original series almost immediately paid dividends. As Sarandos noted,

  Ultimately, we want to produce original content, because it’s time we have more control over the shows that matter the most to our customers. We’ve really come to appreciate the value serialized shows provide. So many people watch them and love them. Our data supports the trend, and that’s why you see such an explicit investment in television on Netflix. We’ve been able to grow the audience for serialized content by recognizing their behavior and securing more and more highly serialized, well-produced, one-hour dramas.19

  After an experimental co-production with the Norwegian broadcasting network NRK1 for the creation of the mobster dramedy Lilyhammer (2012–2014), Netflix’s first major solo investment in original programming was the ambitious political drama House of Cards (2013–). Sarandos took on the risk of betting over $100 million for a two-season order, a bold but strategic plan in order to profit the symbolic capital Netflix needed to enter the field of television series production. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hastings said, “If we were to get into original programming and it didn’t work out, I didn’t want it to be because we didn’t try hard enough or we weren’t ambitious enough…. I wanted to know that if it didn’t work, it was because it was a bad idea.”20 The consecration instances proved that it was not a bad idea: produced by and starring Kevin Spacey and written by Beau Willimon, the remake of the 1990s BBC political drama received strong reviews and was awarded the first major Primetime Emmy win for an online television series, given to director David Fincher for the first episode. The series also helped increase Netflix’s subscriber base by more than two million in the first quarter of 2013.21

  However, it was with Arrested Development that Netflix made its highest profile investment of the 2013 releases—which also included the successful dramedy Orange Is the New Black (2013–), the comedy Derek (2012–2014), and the horror thriller series Hemlock Grove (2013–2015). Fans of Arrested Development anticipated the series’ reboot since its cancellation in 2006, especially since the original finale indicated the creative team’s desire to return to the Bluth family story. Hurwitz explained the project’s transition—initially planned as a film—during the series’ hiatus:

  When the show was canceled, I knew I wanted to do more…. At the time, Ron [Howard] didn’t think it was a movie, and he was right. When you get a show canceled, it’s hard to imagine how you’re going to get a movie studio to put money into it. It was really a successful, sneaky thing to have Ron say at the end of the show that maybe it was a movie. That was more of an accident, but I really wanted to make it as a movie at that point…. [Howard] wasn’t really on board, but then a couple of years later it started snowballing, and he did start to think it might be a movie. By then, I was doing a number of things, and it was too time-consuming to do it. It wasn’t until December of 2011 that I started to really work out the movie. I realized, “Wow, it almost calls for a new form.”22

  At Netflix, the interest in reviving the series was based on the data collected by the taste-based algorithm technology developed by the company to track subscribers’ viewing habits. Such technology is a major investment for the company and one of the streaming platform’s strongest features, responsible for creating a consumption flow for its subscribers homologous to that of traditional television programming. As Cindy Holland, Netflix Vice President of Original Programming, noted, “[Reviving] Arrested Development made sense for us because the show was a cult favorite and we’ve had for a number of years and knew how many new fans were being created through our service.”23 For Sarandos, Netflix was in a prime position, technologically, to help a series such as Arrested Development to find—or rediscover—its audience:

  Arrested Development is unique. If all the technology that’s in place today were around when Arrested came out, it pr
obably would have been a huge hit. Remember, the show was canceled the same year that we started streaming. Prior to that, the notion of catching up on a show didn’t really exist. For us to consider [reviving a series], it needs to be more than a great show for the people who love it. We need to try and find a bigger audience for it for the economics to make sense.24

  In its partnership with Hurwitz and his team, Netflix benefited from the creative power and innovation capacity of the series’ producers, which explored the possibility of streaming the full season at once in the design of the fourth season. As Holland noted about Netflix’s approach to creative development, “We’re buying their vision, not ours. Part of the conversation early on is thinking about it as a 13-hour movie. We don’t need recaps. We don’t need cliffhangers at the end. You can write differently knowing that in all likelihood the next episode is going to be viewed right away.”

  The successful partnership for Arrested Development’s reboot years after its cancellation arose from such confluence of interests, a harmonic encounter between the plan idealized by Hurwitz to bring back the series—and to expand the innovative characteristic of its language and storytelling—and Netflix’s commercial and artistic ambitions to rise within the television industry. The alignment between creative energy and strategic management produces one of the more notable examples of narrative experimentation in contemporary television, evidenced by highly fragmented, complex storytelling and a puzzle-like design of the episodic narrative. However, such innovation and experimentation were already present in Arrested Development’s original run, though to a lesser extent—with the interconnection of multiple plots and storylines, the juxtaposition of various layers of jokes (both visually and narratively), and the use of foreshadowing to offer clues about upcoming narrative turns. To understand how the fourth season’s storytelling is radically structured, we need to first understand how these elements came to be and were already present in the series during earlier episodes, and how they helped to define Arrested Development’s narrative and aesthetic style.

  “Now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything”: How Arrested Development Came to Be

  By the late 1990s, Howard’s involvement in two very different creative projects inspired his thinking about the possibility of a new sitcom aesthetic. First, he directed EdTV (1999), a film about an ordinary guy, video store clerk Ed (Matthew McConaughey), who agrees to have a camera crew following him around for a live, real-time reality TV channel. As the director, Howard led the creative team toward an experimental exercise with the documentary aesthetic and production style of reality television, a key decision that would later influence Howard and producing partner Grazer’s approach in defining Arrested Development’s own comedic language.

  The second important experience at the time was POP.com, a web partnership between Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks. The platform offered free short form videos, ranging from one to six minutes, from a variety of genres, but with a particular focus on comedy. With funding from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the project purported to explore web features available at the time, including chat and a content upload option for users; this is a similar structure to what would later become YouTube.25 Although the company was headlined by notable names in the film and technology industries, POP.com did not survive the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s. Despite this failure, the project strengthened Howard’s belief that it was possible to create a more dynamic, spontaneous visual style, or a “lower cost sort of television, that could be produced, that would utilize a new kind of visual vocabulary that was coming out of reality television and docu TV.”26

  In 2002, with EdTV and POP.com in mind, Howard and Grazer collaborated with then-president of Imagine Entertainment Nevins to create a sitcom that would explore this new visual grammar—in a quick and affordable production environment. Their planned approach would also eliminate some of the most time-consuming stages of the shooting process—such as filming the performance in the presence of an studio audience—in exchange for a fast-paced, improvised, and self-referential comedic style. According to Nevins, “The intent by Ron, who spent half his life in multiple-camera comedy and half his life as a single-camera director, was to marry the best of both worlds.”27 Nevins played a key role in bringing together the creative talent behind Arrested Development. During the 1990s, Nevins worked as a producer at NBC and, among other things, oversaw the development of Everything’s Relative (1999), a failed sitcom developed by Hurwitz. The sitcom portrayed a family’s dysfunctional relationship and, although it was canceled after only five episodes, made enough of an impression on Nevins that he believed Hurwitz to be the voice of a new kind of comedy.28

  With Arrested Development, Hurwitz was very meticulous with the scripts, rewriting the jokes until the last minute. The writing staff regularly visited the set, so that adjustments could be made while shooting with the actors. According to Hurwitz, the goal in writing and refining as many jokes as possible was to ensure the sitcom’s realistic style. Such a production process resulted in a densely packed sitcom, with multiple layers of comedy and many set-ups, callbacks, foreshadowing, and complex intertwined narrative threads—characteristics that rewarded re-watching. In addressing such practice as a self-controlled and structured action, Jason Mittell identifies three main aspects: the analytical re-watching, the aesthetic reappraisal, and the social experience. Combined, these aspects produce a more global phenomenon known as “the ludic experience.”29 About the analytical motivation, Mittell says the goal is primarily the close observation of the structure, engineering, poetic, and even the plot presented by the narrative. Creative works such as Arrested Development, for example, enable hermeneutic analysis of its episodes, since they encourage an “operational aesthetic of marveling at a show’s complex storytelling mechanics alongside the forward drive of the plot.”30

  The content’s aesthetic reappraisal is a personal motivation to revisit episodes that trigger specific emotional responses, while the social experience includes the expectation and the analysis of the reactions of newly arrived viewers. Finally, the ludic experience refers to a form of play: “Solving puzzles, seeking patterns, embracing the thrill of discovery, managing our emotional investments, and vicariously experiencing the text through other’s eyes. We re-watch as participants in the game, seeking new victories or challenges within the text and our social experiences of media viewing.”31 Mittell also points out that, in comedy series, narrative complexity tends to renew the genres’ conventions and to subvert the relationship between multiple plots, creating a tangle of stories that will often intersect or collide.32 Mittell mentions Seinfeld (1989–1998), one of the main references when talking about sitcoms, in which the episodes usually started with four independent threads (one for each of the protagonists) that, throughout the story, would come across each other with unlikely repercussions. According to Mittell, Arrested Development enhanced such technique, with coinciding threads intertwined in a manner so complex that the serial narrative became an elaborate set of inside jokes:

  [Arrested Development] expands the number of coinciding plots per episode, with often six or more story lines bouncing off one another, resulting in unlikely coincidences, twists, and ironic repercussions, some of which may not become evident until subsequent episodes or seasons. While this mode of comedic narrative is often quite amusing on its own terms, it does suggest a particular set of pleasures for viewers, one that is relatively unavailable in conventional television narrative.33

  Regarding Howard’s original vision of a visual grammar, Arrested Development’s style approaches the aesthetics of the cinéma vérité observational documentary—something of a “comedy verité” style.34 Although the series does not explicitly fall within the category of mockumentary television comedies such as The Office (2001–2003; 2005–2013), Modern Family (2009–), and Parks and Recreation (2009–2015), it does employ similar techniques, including the use of handheld ca
mera aesthetics and “archival footage, surveillance cameras, old photographs, and newspaper covers to corroborate or deny the characters’ statements.”35 The observational aesthetic in Arrested Development also makes it easy to hide visual references and gags in the scenes’ composition. According to Christian Pelegrini, such elements are also a cognitive challenge for the viewer, since the dynamic pace of the episodes, with quick cuts and fast dialog, requires a lot of attention. Viewers must keep up with events in the foreground, but technologies like the DVD, DVRs, and Netflix encourage additional consumption to catch self-referential jokes in the background of many scenes.36 The narrative and aesthetic strategies explored by Arrested Development display that the cognitive challenge proposed to the audience was already present in the series’ original run at Fox. Such elements have been exacerbated and radicalized in the fourth season at Netflix, as we will observe next.

  “Keep those balls in the air!” The Fragmentation of Arrested Development’s Narrative Structure at Netflix

  As we have argued in this essay, the narrative of Arrested Development’s fourth season is remarkably different from the way the story was told throughout the first three years of the series, on Fox. Three main aspects were found where it is possible to observe the changes employed in Netflix’s episodes, which are explored in detail below. The aspects are: (1) the elevation of the other eight members of the Bluth family to the condition of leading character of their own episodes, as opposed to Michael’s role as the protagonist in previous seasons; (2) the circular temporal structure of the narrative discourse; and (3) the shifting balance between individual episodic arcs, focused on each of the nine main characters, and a larger multiperspectivist serial narration throughout the season. Generally, all three aspects identified in the narration of the fourth season relate to an important logistics issue regarding Arrested Development’s continuation seven years after its cancellation.