How did Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt come to you guys?
Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos: It was probably one of the most remarkable developments of the last couple of years in television. We’ve had this history of rescuing a show. Either a really loved show that’s long-gone, like Arrested Development, or more recently, The Killing and Longmire. And this was a strange opportunity where, usually when shows don’t make it, sometimes it has very little to do with the quality and it has everything to do with the time slot, the lead-in show, the time of year it came out. All those things. And Kimmy was one of those things that both the network and the producers were a little nervous about the time of the year it was coming. They didn’t have a complementary program to launch it with.Just that whole new-season thing makes people nervous?
Yeah, yeah. I think that they were super bold and said, “Look, let’s make this show a success. It could be a success on Netflix.” We got a call from Tina Fey and from Dave Miner to come to New York. We came up literally on the last day of production, watched some of the shooting. Met with Tina and the team, heard what they were planning, and said, “Look, if you can work it out with NBC, we’d love to do it. And within 12 hours, we’d seen nine of the 13 episodes. And within four days, the deal was done. So for us it was this huge thing, but the whole thing happened in four days.
Source & More: Vulture
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