Netflix In The News With Another Original Series, Closely Followed By Yahoo
While you and I may dream, and television network tremble in fear, of the day when we can actually cut the cable cord we find ourselves suckling up to because there are no real choices companies like Netflix are very slowing becoming original producers of content – and that is a good thing.
We already have Lillyhammer available on Netflix and down the road we will also be getting two new series with House of Cards and the revival of the cult favorite Arrested Development, but now we get word that there will yet another series coming directly to Netflix in early 2013.
Eli Roth, through Gaumont International Television, has inked a deal with Netflix for an original hour long horror show called Hemlock Grove. At this point Framke Janssen (X-Men) and Bill Skarsgard have signed on as leads in the show that is based on the gothic horror novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy.
The show is set in a Pennsylvania steel town that has been decimated by just about everything and starts with an unsolved crime when a body of a young girl is found. When the crime goes cold and surrounded by all kinds of rumors Peter and Roman (Skargard) decide to investigate on their own in a rown run by the grand dame of Hemlock Grove (Janssen).
Not to be undone, and in line with the company’s recent push into original programming, Yahoo has announced that they will be doing a 90-minute cybercrime multipart feature that will debut in the fall and is being created by Anthony Zuiker, best known for the CSI series.
Zuiker dubbed Cybergeddon — which will be written by Miles Chapman (The Tomb) — as the latest “evolution” of the crime genre. The drama will explore the growing threat of cyber crimes, with Norton by Symantec attached as an adviser.
The former showrunner, whose online credits include the BlackBox TV channel for YouTube, says Yahoo understood the space and scale and committed to the project in a way traditional networks couldn’t.
“They’re really going after A-list talent to be in that space,” he said. “Going wide in the traditional motion picture world is 5,000 screens and this can be 50 million screens on premiere day in multiple languages.”
While details are still a little slim the project will be kicking off this month and Zuiker notes as well that there is always the option as well to grow the show beyond just the web, which we have seen happen before with original webseries like Sanctuary getting bought up by Syfy.
We are only at the very beginning of the whole shift from ‘television’ to web based entertainment and the potential is pretty well unlimited, and I’m looking forward to it.
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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