Now that you’ve spent the long weekend watching the highly anticipated fourth season of “Arrested Development,” you may be craving some more exclusive series. Good news: Netflix is teasing even more content coming next year. With the success of political drama “House of Cards” and horror series “Hemlock Grove,” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos suggested that it could be “feasible that we would double the load that we did this year [with eight new shows].”
Sarandos also hinted that these new series would expand the company’s reach across different genres, and therefore different audiences. “People’s tastes are wildly diverse, and I want to be able to appeal to all of those tastes and across demos,” he said. “I think we can support a lot of specific tastes.”
One of those new genres tackled will be science fiction, with the already-announced “Sense8” from the Wachowskis, which Sarandos teased would be “adult contemporary sci-fi… done in a way that’s very difficult to do for television.” The other big gets for the company’s original programming may be a little more surprising, however. “The other thing I look at is the tween segment,” Sarandos explained, adding that “there’s probably a lot of opportunity in the comedy space, too. The more traditional sitcom space, but done with a different twist. Not like a straight-up-the-middle network sitcom, but the kind of thing that I think FX has done a great job with in shows like ‘Louie’ and ‘Wilfred.'”
Cindy Holland, Netflix’s VP of original programming, also noted that the company might change its approach to original programming in addition to increasing output. “We will be seeking more control over some of our series” she said, pointing to the importance on holding international broadcasting rights. “We think about international expansion, it’s a natural extension for us to want to ensure that we have a series to launch in other places.”
This doesn’t mean that Netflix will necessarily create original shows itself, however. Holland said that the company has “a tremendous amount of respect for the development and pilot process, but it’s not something that necessarily works for our model,” adding that it’s better to monetize content than “having a bunch of development projects and then narrowing that down to a bunch of pilots and then narrowing that down to the ones we order.”
In addition to “Sense8,” upcoming new shows for the company include “Orange Is the New Black,” created by Jenji Kohan (Showtime’s “Weeds”) and Ricky Gervais’ “Derek,” both of which are scheduled to appear before the end of the year.
