The streaming wars are heating up—which is to everyone’s benefit, really, except for people who still watch terrestrial free TV. But they’re not really important, at least until civilization collapses and the Internet gets shut off, and the only way to watch TV is by fashioning wire hangers into makeshift rabbit ears in hopes that Seinfeld reruns are still floating out in the ether somewhere.
We’ve got a cache of canned goods for when that time comes, but in the meantime, Netflix is trying to assert its dominance over rivals Amazon and Hulu (and, uh, Vudu) by snapping up the streaming rights to popular TV series before anyone else can. It’s paid dearly for this strategy—$2 million an episode in the case of The Blacklist—and may pay even more, if Gotham turns out to suck.
Netflix has bought the worldwide streaming rights to Gotham three weeks before the series premiere, the first time a streaming service has secured the rights to a show before a single episode has aired. Deadline reports that the deal was made on the strength of a pilot screening in L.A. back in May, and also because people love Batman so much they’ll (presumably) watch anything even tangentially related to the Caped Crusader. Deadline also estimates Netflix may be paying up to $1.75 million per episode for Gotham, which is a big gamble for a show that still has the potential to inspire a collective cry of “What the hell? I thought this show had Batman in it!” We’ll find out when Gotham premieres on Fox on September 22—or be disappointed all at once on Netflix in September 2015.