You can’t always get what you want. Even if you’re Ted Sarandos, the square-eyed Netflix boss who dropped out of college to work in an Arizona video store and today finds himself with the entertainment world at his feet.
He’s just told me his favourite non-Netflix show is The Bear, a kitchen-based comedy drama available on streaming rival Disney+ in the UK. When I ask how it feels to miss out on shows like these, Sarandos heaves a heavy sigh. “I know we can’t do everything, can’t take on every show,” he says, sounding as though he doesn’t quite believe himself. “But I think that’s one I’d like to … ” he breaks off momentarily, presumably to fantasise about a Netflix-Bear union … “It holds TV to a higher bar, which I like.”
Sarandos is one of the kings of Hollywood. As co-chief executive of Netflix — a position he shares with the lower-key Greg Peters, who leads on tech and finance — he has been paid more than $100 million (£75 million) over the past two years. In the past decade or so, he has shaped television.
He is also frighteningly well connected, coolly name-dropping the likes of Kevin Costner (“a very good friend of mine”) and Meghan Markle (“I’ve been out with a lot of famous people before — the way that people react to Meghan is otherworldly”). Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood super-agent and chief executive of entertainment giant Endeavor, says: “Whether it be executives in the industry or the talent, he has great relationships at every level. Incredible, actually.” Why? “He’s outgoing. He’s constantly curious about what’s going on out there.”
Jay Hoag, a venture capitalist who has served on Netflix’s board since 1999, says Sarandos’s “secret sauce” is that he “is one of few people in that world who is just eminently likeable and respected, as opposed to hated or liked but not respected. You probably could find somebody that says a negative thing about Ted, but it’d be really, really hard.”
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I meet Sarandos, 60, in Netflix’s embassy-style office in Rome, which has a cream-stone façade and is guarded by an imposing black gate on a busy street near the city centre.
Sarandos is here to attend the première of Netflix drama Emily in Paris, series four, part two, much of which is set in Rome. He greets me with a warm, well-used handshake followed by an avuncular double-pat on the upper arm. He has flown over for a couple of days from Los Angeles but shows no sign of jetlag. “I can adjust to time zones pretty easily,” he says.
Netflix is, commercially speaking, at the top of its game. Subscriber numbers (278 million), revenues ($34 billion last year) and profits ($5.4 billion) have never been higher and its shares are near their peak, giving it a market value of $300 billion. Netflix is even starting to pay down the debts it has amassed over the years, which stand at about $12 billion, down 13 per cent in the past year.
By most accounts, it has won the global streaming war, having beaten off pandemic-era competition from the likes of Disney+ and Apple TV+. But that’s not how Sarandos sees things.
In the UK, he says, while Netflix is the biggest streamer, the BBC’s iPlayer is the fastest-growing. Netflix commands “only about 10 per cent of total screen time” in this country. “So we still have a lot of work to do.” Is that the goal, then? To maintain Netflix’s position as bigger than the iPlayer in its home market? “No,” he says evenly. “Our aim is to thrill audiences — and that’s the outcome.”
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Clearly, this is not a UK-specific ambition; no longer an upstart, Netflix needs to find a way to keep growing its business. Last year, it boosted subscriber numbers by banning password-sharing and launching a cheaper, ad-supported service.
Netflix launched in the UK in 2012 at £5.99 a month. Today, a standard subscription costs £10.99, and Sarandos confirms that more price rises will come in the future. “We have a long history of this, which is that as we add more and more value to consumers … so the more people are watching and enjoying Netflix, every once in a while we’ll come back and ask for a little bit more money to plough into that and make the continuous virtuous cycle of improvement.”
Sarandos insists that the company won’t seek to boost profits by cutting budgets. “We have to win the market share by entertaining the world. And when we make programmes that people love, they sign up and they stay around.”
The programming strategy that Sarandos says has served his company well is “local”. In the past, he explains, an “explosion of Hollywood exports” left national audiences under-served. Netflix, he reckons, has done a good job of providing an antidote to this — in the UK, with shows such as Baby Reindeer, Bridgerton and The Gentlemen.
Counter-intuitively, he suggests that one advantage of this approach has been that, every now and again, “local” programmes take off and become a global hits, à la Squid Game and Baby Reindeer. “The stories that travel the best are the stories that are most authentically true and local,” says Sarandos. “People can smell it if you try to manufacture something to be global. And when it does work, nobody — including me, including us — predicted it.”
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Sarandos grew up in a modest household in Phoenix, Arizona, his father an electrician and his mother a full-time parent to her five children. His ambition had been to become a journalist once he had finished school, but then “I had this kind of epiphany in junior college that I was not a very good writer, so I was probably not going to be a professional journalist. I didn’t really have a plan B. I was working part-time at a video store and dropped out of school and went full-time at the store.”
From there, he rose through the ranks in video rentals to become vice-president of product and merchandising at West Coast Video, which had nearly 500 stores. Reed Hastings, who co-founded Netflix as a DVD rental service in 1997, recruited Sarandos as his vice-president of product (“I mostly bought DVDs is what I did”). He later moved to become chief content officer. This role took on new significance when Netflix, anticipating improved home internet connections, pioneered TV streaming in 2007.
Early in its life, subscribers to Netflix had been offered second-hand TV shows and films. Sarandos was the guy who bet big on establishing it as a home for original content — starting with a $100 million splurge on Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards in 2013. The Crown, Stranger Things and Sex Education followed.
Sarandos also came up with the idea — then alien, now commonplace — of releasing entire series in one go. You could argue, therefore, that he is the root cause of the 21st century’s binge-watching epidemic. “Years ago, Reed made a comment that haunted us a little, which is that we compete with sleep — which I don’t think is true,” says Sarandos, leaping to his company’s defence when I question its societal impact. “I think we compete for other screen time.”
The Netflix boss, who describes his work schedule as “24-7”, is married to Nicole Avant, a Democrat campaigner and former US ambassador to the Bahamas. He has two adult children from his first marriage, both of whom work in the television sector, not directly with Netflix.
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I ask him how hard he’s found it to balance work with family. “I’d say it’s one of the lies that people are sold, which is that there’s such a thing as work-life balance,” he says. “You are trading off constantly, all the time. So this mission to find the perfect work-life balance, I think, is a fool’s errand.”
This week, Sarandos will be jetting back to Europe for the Royal Television Society’s annual conference in London. There, he will seek to re-emphasise Netflix’s commitment to the UK, which means more commissions for producers and more competition for domestic rivals.
Supporters of the UK’s public-service broadcasters worry aloud that US streamers such as Netflix will continue to eat into their market but have no interest in funding some of the less glamorous programming that they make to inform and serve the public.
Sarandos confirms that Netflix has no immediate plans to move into the news business (although it is in the “never say never category”). But he rankles at the suggestion that Netflix would not have commissioned Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that highlighted the plight of sub-postmasters caught up in the Horizon computing scandal.
He hasn’t seen the show — it isn’t available in the US — but says: “I know the story well … We definitely would have made that show. That is a story about unfairness and underdogs and, I mean, that’s a totally global story.”
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One British programme that Netflix has already taken global is Baby Reindeer, an account by comedian Richard Gadd of his experience with a stalker. The show proved a surprise hit, but has also caused problems for Netflix.
Online sleuths were easily able to identify Gadd’s alleged stalker and she is now suing the company for defamation. I ask Sarandos if he has any regrets. “I’ll just tell you that we’re proud of the show and the way Richard handled the story,” he says flatly.
Netflix and the show’s creators have also been criticised for labelling it a “true story”. In the show, Gadd’s stalker was imprisoned. In real life, the alleged stalker says she has received no conviction.
I ask Sarandos if Netflix will be more careful with “true story” labelling in future. “It was no one’s intent to use a label recklessly,” he says, a little moodily. “That is Richard’s true story. The fact that you’re watching on television says that parts of it were certainly fictionalised and dramatised.” He adds: “I’m surprised that it’s a continued debate.”
While business is booming at Netflix, the streamer has arguably lost some of the upmarket credibility it once commanded. Before my meeting with Sarandos, I had pulled up a ranking of its top ten shows in the UK that day. Top of the list? Worst Ex Ever. Also featured: Love is Blind and a documentary called American Murder.
When I suggest that some might view this list as a bit, well, trashy, Sarandos roars with laughter. “You mean that in a complimentary way?” he asks good-humouredly.
Taking hold of my phone to examine the ranking, he points out that in fifth position is Kaos — “the best telling of Greek mythology in television history”. He adds that the list provides a “great illustration” of Netflix’s diverse roster, which has to appeal to “half a billion different tastes”.
Plus, he adds, even individual subscribers enjoy a mix. “I love Ripley and I love Love is Blind — it just depends what I’m in the mood for,” says Sarandos. “Not everyone will love everything, but we are about pleasing audiences — not critics or people in the industry.”
