Actress/comedian Tina Fey will return to television in a new original Netflix series, The Four Seasons, based on the 1981 theatrical movie of the same name.

The Universal Television-produced, eight-episode series adaptation of the movie, which starred Alan Alda and Carol Burnett and followed the exploits of three couples who take vacations together during each of the seasons, will be produced by Fey along with Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield. The three worked together on the final season of NBC's Emmy-winning comedy series 30 Rock. 

The Four Seasons marks the latest project for Fey and Netflix, following the Fey-produced series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – which ran from 2015-2020 – as well as Girls5eva, which launches its third season on Netflix this March. Fisher previously worked with Netflix on the series Never Have I Ever. 

The Four Seasons, which begins production later this year, is executive produced by Fey, Fisher, Wigfield, David Miner, Eric Gurian and Jeff Richmond, with Alda and Marissa Bregman serving as producers, according to Netflix.

Netflix is amping up its originals slate, putting 85% of all new spending toward content production, chief content officer Ted Sarandos said.

Speaking at MoffettNathanson’s Media & Communications Summit Monday (May 14), Sarandos said the SVOD service expects to have nearly 1,000 originals by the end of the year, about half of which have not yet premiered.

The OTT juggernaut added 7.41 million streaming subscribers worldwide in the first quarter, bringing its global customer base to about 125 million, and it leads the pack in a category forecast to continue booming. Following a gain of 41% in 2017, U.S. OTT revenue is expected to grow another 40% this year, reaching $16.6 billion, according to Convergence Research Group's study The Battle for the American Couch Potato: OTT, TV, Online.

Against that backdrop, Netflix apparently believes Peak TV's apex is still to come.

But while Sarandos evangelized Netflix's content vision, he dampened speculation that Netflix has aspirations in sports and news, saying the company has no plans at this time to pursue either.

More from the MoffettNathanson Summit | via CNBC: How Netflix Budgets New Shows

New Production Deals

Among the most high-profile of Netflix's programming investments is an exclusive production deal with writer/producer/director Ryan Murphy that kicks in July 1. Two new Murphy-produced original series are already lined up, Ratched and The Politician. 

Before luring Murphy away from his FX deal earlier this year, Netflix last summer signed prolific series creator Shonda Rhimes, long attached to ABC, to a multi-year production deal.

Recent new series orders include sci-fi drama Another Life, starring Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica), and multi-camera comedy series Mr. Iglesias, starring Gabriel "Fluffy" Iglesias, whose deal includes two stand-up specials as well.

Upcoming Returns

Netflix on Wednesday (May 16) released its first look at season four of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which returns this month. The season will play out in two halves, with six episodes launching May 30.

Other upcoming returns include Arrested Development (May 29) and GLOW (June 29).

Bookmark This:MCN's Complete Coverage of Netflix

Every month, the analysts at TruthCo choose the most culturally relevant TV show. By “culturally relevant,” we mean the most keenly attuned to and in dialogue with the year’s cultural shifts in terms of content and marketing. From the role of feminism and race in pop culture to the reality of reality TV, these five shows from 2015 touched upon the most relevant social topics in culture today, keeping audiences entertained.

UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT

Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt rewrites the narrative that culture constructs around women who endure sexual abuse. Kimmy’s refusal to settle into the role of the traumatized victim, and her insistence on instead starting her life anew, reflects emergent survivor culture. This shift aligns with the strain of feminism taking hold in pop culture, which emphasizes personal narratives of female empowerment and refusal of defeat at the hands of the patriarchy.

INSIDE AMY SCHUMER

This latest season of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer bears witness to a new confidence as the show’s subversive ideas about gender — previously packaged in Schumer’s claim-to-fame insecure, self-loathing and promiscuous persona — are now being directed outward, fearlessly implicating society and the way it fails women, instead of how women are failing themselves. Better described as “full-frontal feminism,” it takes on a highly confrontational approach to its commentary. But this is not women-only comedy: Schumer makes great use of her male guest stars and represents an increasingly relevant cultural conversation that simultaneously implicates and includes men, who are both in on and the butt of the joke.

UnREAL

Reality TV viewers are curious about the manipulation and staging of reality TV. Lifetime’s UnREAL, a deconstruction of the competition dating genre, aligns with this cultural interest by pulling back the curtain and revealing just how much of a role production plays in creating what viewers perceive as “reality.” UnREAL also delivers this in spades, not only though the behavior of the contestants but more notably through the behavior of the producers, who have their own catfights, love triangles and emotional breakdowns. This meta-series occupies a space that allows it to simultaneously provide a new approach to a calcified (due to its own slump) and well-established genre as well as satisfy die-hard reality lovers. It’s a wink that appeals to almost everyone.

CHEF’S TABLE

Netflix’s Chef’s Table, which uses food as a vehicle to explore the “microjourney” of each chef, is representative of an emergent cultural shift that finds us more interested in craft and process than in result and finished product. Chef’s Table offers a meditation on creativity, portraying chefs as artistic visionaries and auteurs that have more in common with poets and dreamers than the harsh, hierarchical judges who have populated food TV for over a decade. As culture pays more attention to food as an expression of social values, the role of chef has been elevated to that of sophisticated thought leader, a shift echoed by Chef Table’s symphonic score and gorgeous cinematography.

MASTER OF NONE

On this Netflix series, Aziz Ansari (Dev) represents an emergent comedic and cultural point of view as he increasingly takes on the role of a public intellectual who is wrestling with big social questions, not just everyday minutiae. Equally important is the show’s perspective on race, which values inclusive, realistic representations over tokenism. For Dev, frustrated in his attempts to find satisfying work as an actor, it’s not enough that Indian characters are finally being played by Indian actors. The show takes its own advice: Dev wants to play roles that reflect his real experience, and Aziz creates them. These aren’t characters burdened with encapsulating Indian identity as a whole but instead are distinctive, multidimensional, even idiosyncratic, much like the actors who play them.

Emily Morris is director of cultural insights at TruthCo, a New York-based omnicultural branding and insights company.

The wise owl in the classic 1970 "How Many Licks?" TV commercial declared it took three to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. At least that's how many it took before he bit into it.

Netflix wanted to know how many episodes of a TV show it takes before viewers bite into the whole season, and found that in most cases it takes at least three.

The OTT service analyzed global streaming data for the inaugural seasons of more than 20 shows -- Netflix originals and licensed fare -- across 16 markets between January and July and detected a pattern: an episode emerged from each show after which 70% of viewers went on to complete the entire first season.

Netflix calls that the "hooked" episode.

"It turns out that when commercial breaks and appointment viewing are stripped away and consumers can watch an entire season as they choose, you can see fandom emerge," the company said.

Among the cable and OTT shows sampled in the study, viewers were generally hooked by episode 4:

2 Episodes In
--Bates Motel
--Breaking Bad

3 Episodes In
--House of Cards
--Orange Is the New Black

4 Episodes In
--Better Call Saul
--Grace and Frankie
--Pretty Little Liars
--Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

For newly christened Best Drama Emmy winner Mad Men, it took six episodes for viewers to get hooked.

Click here for the full-sized graphic pictured.

"Given the precious nature of primetime slots on traditional TV, a series pilot is arguably the most important point in the life of the show," Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix, said. "However, we found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot. This gives us confidence that giving our members all episodes at once is more aligned with how fans are made."

International Variations
The "hooked" episode remained fairly consistent across worldwide markets, Netflix said, but some slight geographic differences emerged:
--The Dutch tend to get hooked the fastest, one episode ahead of most countries.
--Brazilians fell for Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul one episode sooner than Mexicans.
--Australians and New Zealanders hold out longer than viewers in other countries, generally getting hooked one to two episodes after everyone else.

As for the original question, the Tootsie Pop commercial ultimately concluded "the world may never know" how many licks it takes to get to the chocolatey center, but three groups of student researchers have tried, with less consistency in the results than Netflix's study.

Netflix’s new comedy series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt stars Ellie Kemper (The Office) as an innocent young woman who is discovered with three other women living in an underground bunker in the Midwest for 15 years after following a doomsday cult leader’s end-of-the-world predictions.

The discovery of Schmidt along with her “mole women” counterparts becomes newsworthy and lands the girls a humorous interview with Matt Lauer in New York. Rather than return to her Midwestern roots after the interview, Schmidt decides to go it alone and try to make a life for herself in the Big Apple.

The naïve Schmidt at first enjoys her adaptation to modern life (eating candy for dinner is one of the lifestyle changes she partakes in) but soon realizes that she needs a job and a place to live if she’s going to survive.

A chance meeting with wealthy Manhattanite Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski) lands her a job as the recently divorced woman’s nanny, while an apartment ad in the newspaper leads her to share a pad with a gay, would-be singer Titus (Tituss Burgess) who’s job is to wear a robot suit in Times Square.

The pilot conveniently makes light of Schmidt’s acclimation to her new surroundings with numerous dated references. Schmidt, for example, predicts that Titus’s singing talent will eventually lead him to sing onstage with the now deceased Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston) as well as Schmidt’s innocence about today’s culture.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, created by 30 Rock alums Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, was originally slated to air on NBC but the network sold the series rights to Netflix, which has already green-lighted a second season. NBC’s loss may be Netflix’s gain, as this is a silly but warm series that will have viewers rooting for the “unbreakable” Schmidt to succeed in her new life.