Netflix: 'Arrested Development' Won't Crash Our Service

Nerval's Lobster writes "No, the latest season of 'Arrested Development' won't fatally crash Netflix, despite comedian David Cross's tongue-in-cheek comment that the series will melt down the company's servers on its first weekend of streaming availability. 'No one piece of content can have that kind of impact given the size of what we are serving up at any given time,' a spokesperson wrote in an email to Slashdot. Although 'Arrested Development' struggled to survive during its three seasons on Fox (from 2003 to 2006), the series has built a significant cult following in the years following its cancellation. Netflix commissioned a fourth season as part of a broader plan to augment its streaming service with exclusive content, and will release all 13 new episodes at once on May 26. Like Facebook, Google, and other Internet giants, Netflix has invested quite a bit in physical infrastructure and engineers. It stores its data on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), which offers a significant degree of durability and scalability; it also relies on Amazon's Elastic MapReduce (EMR) distribution of Apache Hadoop, along with tools within the Hadoop ecosystem such as Hive and Pig. That sort of backend can allow the company to handle much more than 13 seasons' worth of Bluths binged over one weekend — but that doesn't mean its streaming service is immune from the occasional high-profile failure."

Let's not kid ourselves here

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Arrested Development is in the same boat as Firefly. It has hard core devoted fans, but there have never been enough of them. If it was really and truly as popular as its fans seem to think, it would still be on the air and it wouldn't be having to rely on Netflix to get available again. I watched the show a few times and it just didn't work for me at all. I really do not get what the big deal was. Let me put it another way - All you guys who posted about how Futurama sucks, so you're glad it's off the air - yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about Arrested Development. I will say that I really cannot think of any other show that Fox tried for so long to shove down its viewers throats despite plenty of evidence that most American TV viewers really did not care at about it and never were going to care about it no matter how long they kept it around and how many promos they ran for it.

Re:Let's not kid ourselves here

[Cinder6]

I'm not going to pretend that everyone will, or should, like the show, but:

The reason I liked Arrested Development is because it's a serial sitcom with no laugh track that doesn't rely on vulgarity or shock value to deliver its laughs to anywhere near the same degree as other shows (see: How I Met Your Mother). I care about that not because I'm a prude, but because I appreciate that it forces the writers to be more creative, rather than regurgitating the same base jokes over and over again. AD also doesn't string the audience along for so long; again picking on HIMYM, that show will be in its 9th season before we actually meet the titular mother. Finally, I like the more varied cinematography that AD's use of single-camera shots allows.

At the same time, I think some of the above made it hard for AD to find a large audience. I know the lack of laugh track alienated some people, incredible though that seems to me, as I find laugh tracks to be an abomination. The serial nature makes it hard to pick up in the middle of a season, let alone the series, and the (slightly) more subtle humor might not be what Americans are looking for. The single-camera shots also made for higher production costs, which in turn hurt the bottom line.

Re: Let's not kid ourselves here

[fearofcarpet]

The thing about the Big Bang Theory is that there are little science-nerd jokes tucked into it that give me a chuckle, while the boiler plate sit com format still makes my wife laugh, who is European and doesn't get the subtle cultural jokes and wordplay of shows like Arrested Development. For example, why is Sheldon's face on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry? That journal (or any other journal that I know of) would never put someone's face on the cover--let alone a theoretical physicist postdoc. I chose to take that as an inside joke because even the equations in the backgrounds of the sets were clearly vetted by people who know better. Meanwhile my wife thoroughly enjoys watching the various ham-handed relationships evolve. So neither of us is in love with show, but we both get some entertainment out if it... and voilà, mass appeal.

...I also think that the new Futurama isn't as good as the original, but it's hard to tell given that I was still in college when it first aired and I probably changed more than the show in time it was off the air. I hope Arrested Development has evolved with its audience, but I keep reminding myself that it can't possible meet my unrealistic expectations. At least they are releasing a whole batch at once so I can power through a few at a time to get re-immersed, rather than having to wait a week or more between episodes.