Netflix Exec May Have Confirmed the 'Gilmore Girls' Revival
There's been Gilmore Girls" revival allegedly happening at Netflix, though of course, no one involved with the show or the streaming service has said anything on the record yet. Still, there have been lots of clues floating around that point to this project totally happening, and the latest may have come from none other than a Netflix exec -- as official as it gets.
Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, recently sat down for a long interview with HitFix critic Alan Sepinwall, where they chatted about what makes the streaming service tick. In addition to some insider-y details about how certain shows get greenlit (the success of Aziz Ansari's standup specials on Netflix made "Master of None" a no-brainer, for instance), Sarandos also talked briefly about the logic behind picking up shows that have been canceled by the traditional networks (or in the case of "Arrested Development" and "Full House," making new seasons/spinoffs of long-canceled shows).
Sarandos doesn't mention "Gilmore Girls" at all until the very end of the interview, when Sepinwall asks him whether or not he'd consider reviving a show that Netflix didn't already have the streaming rights to, using "Community" -- ripe for rescuing after getting cancelled by NBC, but streaming exclusively on rival Hulu -- as an example. Sarandos agreed that that wouldn't be in Netflix's best interest, and then made the slip-up of throwing out "Gilmore Girls" as an example of something the service does have sole possession of -- and perhaps is reviving at this very moment?
Here's the relevant exchange:
HitFix: Could you ever see yourself doing a revival of a show where you don't have the catalog rights? When NBC canceled "Community," you weren't going to pick it up, because it was streaming on Hulu.
Ted Sarandos: Yeah, it's unlikely, because it's such a weird experience to send our members somewhere else to watch something, or to get into the groove of a show. "Gilmore Girls" —I'm trying to think of the shows where people really love them and put them on Netflix that's really the thing that helps us.
Like, we didn't have much insight into how much people love "Community" outside of the Nielsen rating, which are not very dependable.
Does that mean that Netflix saw how much people loved "GG," and used that to influence its decision to bring it back? It certainly seems like that's what Sarandos was indicating, though it looks like he caught himself as soon as he mentioned the show by name, and stopped short of confirming the revival altogether.
Still, his words certainly strongly indicate that this project is happening, and from the set photos we've seen so far, it could be shooting right at this very second. Sarandos also acknowledged in his interview with Sepinwall that the streaming service usually waits a while before announcing its original series, and it appears that that will be the case here as well. But we're more encouraged than ever.
Stay tuned.
[via: HitFix]
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