In the mid-2000s, there was one sitcom around which all comedy nerds zealously rallied: Fox’s Arrested Development. By the standards of the time, it wasn’t a hit (though its first season attracted only slightly fewer viewers than Young Sheldon currently does; that’s what thriving looks like these days). But it won the Emmy for best comedy series, which helped propel it through two additional seasons. Audiences who missed the series when it aired got obsessed when they came across it on DVD, and later on streaming platforms.
Then, in 2013, Arrested Development became the first cult hit comedy to find a second life online as Netflix debuted a much-anticipated fourth season, featuring the show’s entire original cast. It was a huge moment for fans, heralded by Entertainment Weekly with multiple collector’s covers. Here was a thrilling new feature of the streaming era: not only could these platforms, flush with subscribers’ money, deliver us programming too edgy or niche even for premium cable, but they could also spend that cash on reviving our favorite old shows! A fifth season was subsequently released in two parts, in 2018 and 2019.
In later years, such streaming revivals would become more common. Netflix alone rescued and continued NBC’s Manifest and ABC’s Designated Survivor, and made a quasi-sequel, W/ Bob & David, to the cult HBO sketch comedy Mr. Show. This year, it will start streaming the first two seasons of Peacock’s canceled Girls5eva as well as an all-new third.
But back to Arrested Development, the show that (arguably) started it all. If you’re a comedy fan, there’s a chance you’ve seen at least some of it; if you’ve ever been on the internet, you’ve seen the show GIFed. If not, though, it’s about to get a lot harder to catch up: Arrested Development is leaving Netflix next month. And not just the three seasons Netflix licenses: the two new seasons it commissioned are evaporating too.
The phenomenon of shows suddenly being disappeared from streaming platforms first started making headlines last year, when Warner Bros. and Discovery merged. Shortly after, the new company announced not only that some of HBO Max’s original shows and films would be canceled (or never released at all), but that their existing seasons would no longer be available to stream on the platform.
Some of us are old enough to remember a much different pop-culture ecosystem, where our access to film or TV was limited to second-run theaters syndication, the public library, or what a friend of a friend might just happen to have captured and saved on VHS. The internet, of course, changed that. You could hop on a fan site and ask a like-minded someone to mail you a videotape of the episode your own VCR failed to record. EBay opened up more possibilities, and DVDs, and the DVR. By the time video-streaming technology arrived, we’d grown used to dialing up absolutely any media we could think of, immediately and without buffering.
So yes, there’s a degree of entitlement to the outcry that has greeted the new wave of cancellations. (And an asterisk: season four of Arrested Development is available on DVD and to purchase on Prime Video, though season five seems to exist only on Netflix.) Except, nothing like this has really happened in this media environment before. When a platform launches a title that is only ever supposed to exist in digital streaming form—like the final two seasons of Arrested Development—the consumer may reasonably assume it’s going to stay there. We’ve now had to learn that this compact is not what we thought it was, as impecunious media conglomerates try to claw back some of what they’ve spent.
Some creators have always had this eventuality in mind, it seems. Alena Smith, who created Dickinson for AppleTV+, tweeted last summer, “The Batgirl/HBO Max situation is why I spent my last day on set of Dickinson calling an exec at apple and *begging* for a physical recording of my show … they actually gave me one, I have the ONLY copy….People said I was crazy but dude, that’s ten years of my life.” Patrick Somerville, creator of the HBO Max-exclusive Station Eleven, has another approach in mind: “If Station Eleven ever disappears I promise to purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave desert and just play it on loop, projected on a rock, forever.” (A 4K DVD set is coming later this month; preorder yours now! Then…buy a DVD player!)
Maybe it was always a poor strategic decision for Netflix to make two more seasons of a show it would eventually have to relinquish to 20th Television, a Fox subsidiary. Soon, those first three will only be available on Hulu (which is owned by Disney, which also bought Fox). This situation does, however, prompt another question: what happens if Netflix loses its access to the first seasons of another beloved show it brought back to life, like Gilmore Girls? If Warner Bros. calls Gilmore Girls back to HBO Max, will A Year in the Life—which debuted on Netflix in 2016, also to much fanfare—also cease to exist?
“If it does, that’s…actually fine,” some will say; those last two Arrested seasons were similarly divisive, even for the show’s most rabid fans. (Especially season five, which came with nasty revelations about Jeffrey Tambor’s alleged on-set behavior.) But that’s not the point. Broadcast networks have a hard enough time convincing their rapidly shrinking audiences to commit to any of their shows, and over-the-air programming is (theoretically) free. Streaming platforms demand that we pay them every month, and their deep, apparently permanent content libraries are supposed to be part of that value proposition. If they don’t seem to have any attachment to their very own shows, how can we?
