Making a fourth season of Arrested Development, the side-splitting comedy more realer about Orange County than any reality show claiming to depict the real OC, is succeeding because of Netflix, according to Mr. Tobias Fünke himself, David Cross. That's not a reference to the tens of millions of viewers who tuned out to the first three seasons that ended on Fox six years ago now catching up via Netflix but the membership content supplier itself getting out of the way of production.
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Much to the delight of the cast, the crew and the tens of thousands of us who have been along for the ride all along.
“Netflix is great,” Cross tells Rolling Stone. “They don't meddle at all. They know
what they want. They're happy to have it. The idea of Fox and NBC and
being kind of studio- or network-loyal is absurd. People don't give a
shit. What is it? It's on the plane. It's on Netflix. It's on Hulu. It's
on YouTube. It's on the Internet. That's how people watch TV.”
Arrested Development, he adds, would not have been cancelled in 2006 if television executives realized “what
everybody else already knew, which is that people aren't watching the
show the night it airs.”
For Season IV, Cross let it slip that there will be more episodes of Arrested Development (13) than the 10 originally planned because,”There's too much story.”
Too much of a good thing can't be bad.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.