Production Companies Can Influence TV Networks

Like many of its peers, Fox has adopted the “trailing five” model for its big shows on Hulu, notably the Zooey Deschanel vehicle (past seasons of which recently debuted on Netflix). Briefly, that means that if you want to catch up on New Girl from the beginning, you need to subscribe to a cable/satellite/telco TV service in order to watch every episode—otherwise, you can only access the most recent five episodes on a nonauthenticated service (eight for The Simpsons). 

Neither the networks nor producers wanted to talk on the record about this, but the ideal setup is mostly gleaned from historical data.