So much for duplicity. As late as yesterday I was merely asking the question if Netflix’s decision to relieve 1000 or so dedicated employees of their responsibilities was right-sizing or performance-related. Yesterday’s even more stunning news made it crystal clear it was far more the latter. VARIETY’s Rebecca Rubin was among the first to share what she read behind the daunting paywall of the tenacious Matt Belloni just after lunch:
In a major executive shake-up, Bela Bajaria is out at Netflix after 10 years at the streamer, most recently serving as its chief content officer. She will be replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice, as first reported by Puck. As chief content officer, Rice will lead Netflix’s global content organization, overseeing scripted and unscripted series, film, live events and more across all regions.
Under her watch, Bajaria oversaw popular TV series including “Bridgerton,” “Squid Game,” “Adolescence,” “Beef,” “Stranger Things” and “Wednesday,” and films such as “KPop Demon Hunters” and “Frankenstein.” She also pushed Netflix into more live sports and events like “The Roast of Tom Brady” and deals with the NFL and WWE.
But in recent months, as Netflix growth has slowed, so too has the aura around its original programming. The streamer won just 16 Primetime Emmy Awards this year — down from 30 in 2025 and quite a distance from 2021, when it tied the record for most Emmys won by an outlet in a single year, with 44. All told, 2026 was Netflix’s lowest Primetime Emmy haul since 2016.
Throw in the widely reported analyses that showed alarmingly high drop-off in viewership of new seasons of those and other returning shows, as well as the continuing rise of YouTube as the default destination that Netflix defined itself as during Bajaria’s rising limb stage, and it’s clear any pretense about these moves being solely a nod to a struggling stock price should be dropped. The fact this is all happening the week before the company’s quarterly earnings report is incidental to the reality that Teddy Bear Sarandos is miffed that he’s losing the battle for behavioral control of demographically desirable minds, and he likes to win.
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Alex Weprin and Aaron Couch reminded their readers that Sarandos had telegraphed his frustration a few weeks earlier:
Sarandos lamented at the Bloomberg Screentime summit on Sept. 30 that “overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.”
They also reinforced the founder of the cutthroat and unforgiving culture he fosters as having recently reminded the world that said passion had been instilled from pretty much the day they decided that there was a quicker way to get content to people than shipping DVDs:
Netflix founder Reed ….Hastings was fond of comparing Netflix to a sports team, making a point to say that the company was not a family. “If you say it’s like a championship sports team and we’ve got all these competitors and we want to win the championship, then people understand why the coaches make changes,” he told a Semafor podcast in August.
So yeah, this move has much more in common with how George Steinbrenner used to run the Yankees–or how Jerry Jones runs the Cowboys to stay in this century–than it does with how the investment community’s unrealistic expectations are not being met. “What have you done for me lately?” is the common bond, and the gap between the last time Sarandos felt Bajaria had lived up to his own arguably unrealistic expectations is why she’s now number 1001 on those whose work e-mails were shut down by the time these stories began to appear.
The choice of Rice to take this challenge on is a rare acknowledgment on the part of the Netflix culture that someone somewhere else was building a pretty decent mousetrap. Sarandos’ gushing recap of his CV in his internal memo to his remaining employees reflected that sentiment:
Peter is one of the most effective at-scale operators in the entertainment industry. His business acumen is sharp, his talent relationships are exceptionally strong, and his experience across both TV and film is deep and broad. On the film side, running Fox Searchlight, he helped bring beloved fan favorite films like Slumdog Millionaire, Little Miss Sunshine, Sideways and Juno to screens. And more recently, as Chairman of Walt Disney Television, he led one of the most successful television divisions in the world, where he was responsible for a massive breadth and scale of shows ranging from The Simpsons, American Idol ,and Modern Family, to The Bear, and Abbott Elementary, along with ABC News programming and major sporting events such as the Super Bowl, NBA Finals and FIFA World Cup Finals. He’s one of the few people in our industry who has ever operated at the quality and scale that we do at Netflix every day.
I’ll second those motions and add this: I’ve rarely come across an executive who can be as self-effacing as he is daunting in the same breath. During one of the first town halls he hosted when he rose to the head of Fox’s networks he confessed he was overwhelmed by overnight ratings–in a good way. “I’ve been used to making movies that would sometimes be seen by hundreds of people at once if we were lucky. Now I see what we do is seen by millions. It’s pretty awesome”. This coming from someone we all knew was effectively the fifth adult Murdoch child, having initially been given a chance to work for FOX Film’s Tom Sherak as a reward to his father, who helped Rupert shut down the British press unions that had limited his ability to run his beloved tabloids as profitably as he desired. And whenever the ROI of anything Searchlight touched was discussed in comparison to how our businesses were going, just about every senior executive would hold Rice up as the gold standard we were challenged to aspire to.
Rice’s one major misstep at Disney was to incur the jealous wrath of chairman Bob Chapek when “The Other Bob” was fighting for his own survival and actually expected to be fairly compensated for his efforts. Lacking the protection of his pop by proxy, Rice was finally vulnerable to the kind of adolescent jealousy an insecure top executive can often exhibit. So don’t dismiss his own motivation to prove his naysayers wrong, which clearly aligns with the combative determination of Sarandos to do same with those petty investors who have soured on him because Netflix’s trajectory is now closer to that a trad media company than that of a Silicon Valley monolith that merely dabbles in media for sh-ts and giggles. It’s a potentially potent combination, and a wonderful endorsement of the culture that thrived in. We’re feisty, nimble and resilient. Dare I say, FOX-y.
And as if any further proof was needed to justify such a parochially arrogant claim news also trickled out as practically an afterthought about another FOX alumnus who is rising from the ashes yet again. THE WRAP’s Lucas Manfredi took Belloni’s other “scoop” and went wide with it at just about the same time the Rice story was boiling over:
Former NBCUniversal and Paramount Skydance executive Jeff Shell is making a comeback to the entertainment industry with plans to launch a private investment vehicle focused on acquiring and managing linear television assets, two individuals familiar with the matter told TheWrap.
Shell’s new venture would look to acquire or invest in the declining assets, which include cable TV networks, individual TV stations or station groups, with plans to use the cash they throw off to build out adjacent businesses — a strategy similar to the Comcast cable network spinoff Versant.
Naturally, I’m rooting for this comeback even more. I’ve never hidden how much respect I have for Shell and his own proven abilities to create and evolve multiple businesses and succeed by zagging while the rest of the world zigs. I’ve covered his recent successes and failures in copious detail, lately through a lens of disappointment since Shell’s personal life choices have been his own Kryptonite. And given that he’s now worked at the top levels of every legacy media conglomerate and absorbed the numbers, strategies and projections of just about every declining asset you can imagine there’s practically no one breathing more qualified to squeeze value out of something that may not be meeting outsized expectations but still commands enough audience and zeitgeist share to be significant. You know how every political activist has been sounding the alarm that if David Ellison violates the terms of his pinky promise that he’d make 30 movies he’d have to sell off the likes of Comedy Central? Guess who’ll be waiting on the other end to keep it alive in some way, shape or form. And if you’ve been wondering how major league baseball and the NBA are going to handle the demise of the legacy RSN businesses and cobble the temporary solutions into a viable and profitable business for its team owners, who better to do so than the guy that first saw all of those weird local channels and convinced Murdoch he could turn it into a “network” that reversed the standard prime time/fringe model and was able to overcome the hard fact that Nielsen was incapable of measuring it as such?
All in all, a lousy week for Netflix employees, to be sure. But not a bad day to be a FOX alumnus. These days, we take the win no matter how infrequent or fleeting.
Until next time…