[T]he innovations Arrested Development (2013) will bring to television narrative and distribution have existed in smaller, less-obvious and lower-budget forms online for over a decade.

As I explored in a recent article in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, the web series market has existed for nearly twenty years, and in that time has routinely upended our expectations of what television is and can be. Arrested Development is building on years of work from scores of producers of independent television — television produced not just by independent production companies (mostly), but also television produced independent of the industry’s conventions. Web series are a vital and largely unexplored part of the Golden Age of Television, which critics have largely located on basic and premium cable.