Arrested Development’s New Netflix Business Model: Solid As A Rock?

It’s been a year since Netflix released its first original content with the Norwegian series LilyHammer. With four new series already under their belts (Lilyhammer, Bad Samaritans, Hemlock Grove, and the critically acclaimed House of Cards), as well as several comedy specials and a long-form film, the company seems committed to original programming. The streaming service has come up with an interesting business model for its series; rather than follow television’s time-honored weekly release schedule, Netflix simultaneously releases every episode online. Netflix isn’t sharing viewership information, but all indications are that the business model has been successful.

But Arrested Development didn’t take “all indications are that the business model has been successful” for an answer. Instead, when show creator Mitch Hurwitz brought the new season of the acclaimed series to Netflix, he came with a new business model of his own.

I can’t believe no one else has made this reference. [via Arrested Development Wikia]

When Arrested Development is released later this month, it’ll follow Netflix’s game plan with a subtle twist. The 15 twenty-minute episodes will all be released on May 26, but instead of episodes that must be watched in a prescribed order, the episodes will instead be interconnected with every episode covering different perspectives of the same timeframe. Not only that, the season will tie directly into a proposed Arrested Development movie. Series star Jason Bateman explained Hurwitz’s innovative vision for the series in the April 2013 issue of GQ:

So Mitch [Hurwitz, the show’s creator] was always planning on writing a movie. Every time he went to start a movie script, there was so much work to be done just to fill the audience in on where the family had been since the end of the show, and to also initiate the uninitiated about who these characters are. So he thought: The only way to tell a story of this size is to do the first act in episodes. So it’s really a hybrid distribution of one big story. The episodes are simply act 1, and the movie will have act 2 and act 3 in it. So one does not work without the other.

[…] It’s not exactly like a Choose Your Own Adventure type of thing, but Mitch has written these episodes exclusively for the distribution platform and format of Netflix, knowing that they were all going to be released, like an album, on the same day. So certain clues are revealed to you based on the order in which you watch them. There will be an order that is suggested, but because part of the fun of what he does is so dense and multilayered—I mean, if you could see the writers’ room before we started shooting—the cards and literally the strings of yarn, different colored characters where plotlines and index cards are matched to this one, and then there’s an entire other room that is the movie. It looks like A Beautiful Mind.

Ron Howard, executive producer and the show’s narrator, confirms that the proposed Arrested Development film hasn’t been greenlit yet, but if reaction to the series is even moderately positive, I find it hard to imagine that the film won’t be made. If the movie is made, Netflix can expect to add a lot of moviegoers who hadn’t previously subscribed to Netflix so they can watch the first act.

And if that happens, you can bet that Netflix and other streaming content providers will use the Arrested Development business model — let me finish — in the future.