After expanding to 41 countries and producing nearly two dozen shows of its own, Netflix (NFLX) is releasing its first original series entirely in another language. The 13-episode comedy will be set in the world of professional futbol, with dialogue in Spanish.
While there’s clearly a possibility for cross-over appeal—many Netflix subscribers regularly stream subtitled fare—the company’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, has described the soccer satire as a play for “a market as important to us as Mexico and Latin America.” High-quality original programs are the current gold standard in Netflix’s rivalry with everyone from Amazon to HBO, and this new show appears to be a bet that creating shows in more languages can further expand the appeal of a Netflix subscription.
The new show, currently untitled, will debut next year from the production team behind Nosotros los Nobles, a box-office hit in Mexico that showed the foibles of a wealthy family forced to cope with sudden poverty (Not unlike another Netflix-produced series, Arrested Development). The movie’s director, Gil Alazraki, and producer, Leonardo Zimbron, formed Alazraki Entertainment this year and were keen to keep the film’s production crew intact for another project. The show will be filmed in Mexico, with a cast drawn from across Latin America.
The Spanish-langue show might only be the start of Netflix’s original non-English programming push. The company has its sights set next on France and Germany, where and analysts expect the streaming service to debut in both later this year. When Netflix moves into a new market, typically one in five titles in its streaming library will be local content, according to Netflix spokesman Joris Evers. The process of selecting a streaming library for a new country sounds quite similar to how Netflix decides to green-light its original shows: An assessment of the shows and movies popular in the market, along with analysis of entertainment content most frequently pirated by locals.
Netflix’s first original series, Lillyhammer, was arguably the company’s first non-English series, produced in partnership with a Norwegian broadcaster. The first season of that drama—starring Steven Van Zandt as a New York mobster turned government witness hiding in Norway—is predominantly Norwegian, with English subtitles. The dialogue in the second season included more English. Don’t expect any all-Norwegian original shows, just yet, across Netflix’s global portfolio.
