What I’m Hearing: Ted’s Mea Culpa, Harvey’s Threat, ‘Stranger’ Danger

Happy Memorial Day, and welcome back to the short work week. We’ve got a packed issue today, with a few contributor treats and updates on stories we’ve been following. Let’s dive in…
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Happy Memorial Day, and welcome back to the short work week.

We’ve got a packed issue today, with a few contributor treats and updates on stories we’ve been following. Let’s dive in…

Discussed in this issue: Shari Redstone, Ted Sarandos, Jesse Armstrong, the Duffers, Barry Diller, Tom Quinn, Maureen Dowd, Amber Heard, David Ellison, Harvey Weinstein, Weird Al, and the worst Succession episode.

Quote of the Week

“I hope so. I mean, I think so.”
-Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-C.E.O., when asked by Maureen Dowd whether, given the company’s stock dive, he should survive its infamous “Keeper Test” and remain in his job.

A little more on that Sarandos piece…

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Netflix’s Six-Point Crisis Playbook

Ted Sarandos’ damage-control confessional provides a fascinating glimpse into Netflix’s psyche at an inflection point for the company.

MATTHEW BELLONI

n the weeks since the Great Netflix Correction, Ted Sarandos has taken it on the chin from the business media that fawned over Netflix for a decade. Still, it’s a bit surprising that he so quickly ran to Maureen Dowd for his more than 4,500 word quasi-mea culpa. Maybe it helped? I surveyed a bunch of savvy media experts and got wildly different responses.

“Smart choice,” one veteran texted me. “Better for him to be on his front foot,” said another. “Was time to stop taking shit,” said yet another. “He covers a lot of territory here,” one said, meaning that when Ted is asked in the months ahead about Dave Chappelle or the advertising pivot or even the fate of lieutenants Scott Stuber and Bela Bajaria, he can now point to this piece, which sort of backs them (“I would say we are always reaching for the highest performance,” co-C.E.O. ReedHastings says, “but our content is not why the current slowdown is happening”) while leaving room for personnel changes if needed.

But I keep thinking about the transparent strategy at play here, and the sentiment from other savvy observers was that this was all a bit much, and way too soon, especially during what should be a heads-down, focus-on-the-content moment for an embattled company. And the fact that Sarandos is even discussing in The New York Times whether he can pass his own ridiculous “Keeper Test” is already a loss. This piece, to me, is a fascinating window on the Netflix psyche: An overcompensation by innovative executives that are not used to bad press, care very deeply about their positioning among peers (and the elites that read the Times), and seem to be relying on a crisis P.R. handbook:

1. Place this with Dowd, a respected Pulitzer-winner at the Paper of Record, but an industry outsider, writing not for the news or business sections but for the humanizing Sunday Styles, who will ask good questions yet won’t quote Netflix’s more fiery critics or push Ted on the tougher issues...

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