
By Colin Ellis
Arrested Development’s new season on Netflix arrived with the highest expectations for a TV series in recent memory. Not since The Sopranos has a show on such a long hiatus come back to such popular demand.
After it’s somewhat unjustly cancellation in 2006, the show’s cult status grew thanks to DVD, Netflix and other on-demand services. People could watch the entire series in one go, binge viewing as they call it. Why wait for the DVD when you can watch it online for eight bucks a month?
And so the business heads at Netflix realized why not bring the show back from cancellation? It made sense. A built in audience craving new episodes; a cast with nothing better to do (apparently); and a business model that let viewers watch the whole season all at once rather than over 13 weeks. What could go wrong with that?
Truth is, it wasn’t a bad idea. The way people consume television has arguably changed a great deal in the last ten years thanks to the web, so Netflix was only trying to capitalize on what the public presumably wanted. But I’m not convinced it’s a model that’s necessarily going to work, or even should.
Arrested Development’s return should have been a triumph, but it’s been met with mixed reviews. I’m only three episodes in and I’m not impressed. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if episodes were being rolled out once a week. Some seasons take time to build up steam (see The Sopranos season 4). You expect, or hope, the payoff will be worth it. But if you roll out the whole season at once, you give critics, and fans, the chance to chime in early and report on what a disappointment it is.
Rolling out the whole series at once wouldn’t be so bad if the entire season was really good, but then it has to be really good. The reason Arrested Development and other shows built up a huge audience is because people heard through word-of-mouth how good it was. Since they had the first three seasons available to watch on Netflix, their expectations were fully met. And then they told two friends, and they told two friends, and they told two friends…
But unfortunately, I don’t think the binge model of television is one that should be adopted wholesale. Narrative television is one of those mediums that work well in installments. As much as I like having a whole series to sit through over a weekend, I only sit through it if I have some guarantee that it’s going to be good. After watching that first episode of House of Cards, I was pretty reluctant to invest the rest of my time in the show when I heard mixed reviews of the whole season . Had it been released like a regular TV series, I might have been willing to give it more of a chance.
I don’t know if Netflix’s binge model will revolutionize the way we watch television, but as an experiment, the results are still in the lab stage.