Why we should love Ted Sarandos

Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, at the premiere of The Archies in Mumbai last week

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a daily sitcom in the '70s that, as a kid, screen-geek Ted Sarandos used to binge all the week's episodes of - on TV, over a single sitting, when they aired together on Sundays.

Ted grew up to have a successful career in the video/DVD rental business, which is what Netflix was, when he joined it in 2000. He could see people similarly burn through boxed DVD sets of TV shows as well.

That's how the idea of simultaneously dropping all episodes online of a TV show came about - with David Fincher's House of Cards (2013), Netflix's first original. Inadvertently inventing ‘binge-watching'.

And that's what intrigued me about Ted, Netflix's global content boss, when I first met him, over five years ago, in Mumbai. He's been bumped up since, with the dual role of the streaming giant's co-CEO.

What that's done is reduce his screen-time. He also has "lots of travelling [to do], dealing with policy and Wall Street work, less Hollywood," he tells me. We briefly met last week during his second India trip in the same year.

Consider his profile. Netflix is available in over 190 countries. Each with its own catalogue of licensed/original shows, movies. Having skipped the premiere of Leave the World Behind, in New York, and The Crown's final season, in London, Ted somehow made it to the premiere of the Netflix film, The Archies, in Mumbai.

He made a surprise entry. The audience literally comprised A-Z of Bollywood (Amitabh Bachchan to Zoya Akhtar, the director, of course).

What Ted also learnt about Archie was how deeply connected Indians, of a certain vintage, were to the American comic series. I guess you travel or stream, and learn: "It's like how, in Scandinavia, Donald Duck is more popular than Mickey Mouse."

At dinner parties in LA, Ted is obviously asked to recco stuff to watch. He naturally pushes non-American content, because the guests aren't equally exposed to them.

The key challenge, he tells me, is to recreate that dinner scene, through the algorithm, that throws up a sufficient mix of the local and international, coupling comfort-watch, with serendipity/discovery.

Either way, he reckons, audiences worldwide are the same. In their entertainment, they "seek escape, or connect… An untold story about India is [the range of] their
international viewing."

If it wasn't for Netflix, I can't imagine the Korean series Squid Game becoming the top global phenomenon it did. As a film, it had been turned down by local producers for 12 years.

Has India had a ‘Squid Game moment' of sorts yet? Tangentially, yes. When S S Rajamouli's RRR dropped on Netflix, Ted recalls, he casually posted about it on his social media handle: "The press picked it up."

The subsequent RRR rage - with Americans experiencing what was after all "pure southern Indian cinema, only they hadn't seen such a thing before" - is primarily why it went on to grab the first Oscar (Best Song), for an altogether Indian feature. Ted spent three days meeting Telugu film industry titans in Hyderabad, during his current India trip.

Likewise, instant access to The Elephant Whisperers on Netflix is easily a reason it won the Best Documentary Short Oscar in 2023, too. Again, first such for an Indian. As was stand-up comedian Vir Das's International Emmy win for his Netflix special, Vir Das: Landing.

Among other professions, a movie executive's is a bullshit job. I don't say this. Anthropologist David Graeber argues this in his book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).

I do think a lot of movie execs treat their job as that - simply replicating past or others' successes, playing safe gatekeepers, rather than enablers of untested quality content or prime talents.

Privately, Ted comes across to me as a film-buff, tending towards a devoted film critic, drawn to artsy, intimate dramas. Helps that he holds the key to about $16 billion annual production budgets.

During our first meeting, he had returned from the sets of Alfonso Cuaron's Roma, with Martin Scorsese's The Irishman on its way. Hollywood had space for neither.

This isn't to suggest Netflix is art-house central. It does take its prestige shows/films seriously. You could sense it in 2023, in particular, with Trial by Fire, Scoop, Kohrra, and, of course, The Railway Men.

Ted recalls, "About four years ago, I was listening to a long podcast on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, wondering why's this not a series. Glad to know, we were on it."

In February 2022, Netflix founder Reed Hastings dropped a truth-bomb declaiming that India was one [price-sensitive] market they were unable to crack. Prices dropped. Password sharing ceased. Content mix perceptively improved. "It's been cracked, and we wanna keep doing that," Ted smiles.

What's more daunting, perhaps, is the sword of censorship hanging over petrified streamers in India. Already, lawyers vet scripts at OTT offices, like they were merger-acquisition contracts. As we speak, the government has threatened a censor board for OTT platforms. What does Ted make of that?

"That's why it's so important, to me, that we have people on-ground, in the countries we operate - people who understand, not just local regulatory environment, but sensitivities, cultures, customs… Going to war with regulators is not good business," he says. Hmmm.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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