Ensuring that its helplessly binge-addicted victims (and/or customers) never free themselves from its bleary-eyed siren song, Netflix has announced that it’s planning to release 31 original scripted programs next year, almost doubling the number it deployed in 2015. That announcement comes courtesy of the company’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, who cited the success of recent original fare like Jessica Jones and the Aziz Ansari-starring Master Of None as motivation for the diabolical push.
Employing the same phrasing you’d hear from any other dealer of addictive substances, Sarandos assured viewers at the recent UBS Media Conference in New York that his new product was “high quality stuff,” in line with Netflix’s previous offerings. He also discussed the way original programming supports his company’s continued desire to operate on the global market; making its own stuff means Netflix doesn’t have to navigate through the byzantine worlds of regional TV and film licensing deals if it wants to show, say, A Very Murray Christmas to Japanese subscribers (who apparently love Miley Cyrus-heavy holiday weirdness).
According to Sarandos, Netflix plans to continue to push into other forms of media, too; the company has a number of films and kids’ shows in development (not to mention more experimental fare, like that Chelsea Handler-led documentary series, or the potential news magazine programming that keeps getting mentioned from time to time). Pretty much everything, then, except for live broadcasts like sports, although Sarandos did say that, “If there was a model where we create our own sports league, that would be interesting,” before ultimately declaring that ”it’s not really what we’re chasing” at the moment. (And somewhere, the battered souls who once attempted to sell NBC on the idea of an “extreme” arena football league gave a weary, bitter sigh of relief.)