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Originally Posted by buckeye
None of us are privy to the contracts, but how do we know that without Netflix purchasing overseas rights to Discovery the project would even have been viable?
They may not have commissioned the show but their money probably helped bring it to our screens.
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Overseas sales doubtless helped make the business case but that isn’t how production credits work in the industry. In any case, CBS turned down lucrative offers from Amazon and Netflix for exclusive global distribution in favour of using the show to raise the profile of their new streaming service in the USA. Netflix distributed the show in many other territories but not in the US or Canada.
The show was commissioned by CBS and bankrolled by them. Wherever they anticipated getting a return from it, the investment and the risk was theirs. Netflix is bending the truth slightly by calling it a Netflix Original Series. It is a Netflix exclusive, certainly, in the territories where they distribute it, but the terminology they have elected to use would more commonly be used of an actual production partner, which they are not (they would be in the actual end credits alongside all the other production companies and service providers if that was the case, and they aren’t - their credit is spliced onto the very beginning of the stream).