Pandora's Box, page 23
Yet another of Sarandos’s data crunches revealed that hour-long shows devoted as much as 20 percent of their screen time to reminding viewers what had happened in previous episodes. “Exposition is the writer’s enemy,” says Veep’s co–executive producer Simon Blackwell.3 Sarandos converted this 20 percent creative advantage into revenue. “When you can give the filmmaker a much bigger canvas, they’re going to make much better television, because,” he explained in Netflix-speak, “they’re worried about nothing but consumer engagement.”4 It was, however, true.
Opportunities like this were red meat for writers who flocked to Netflix and the streamers that followed, bringing actors like Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, and Dustin Hoffman, who in turn attracted the finest directors and showrunners. Before you knew it, you had a revolution within the revolution. Reviewer A. O. Scott wrote, “A simple, linear story can look as quaint as a VCR or a landline phone. We prefer our plots twisted, nested, networked, layered or otherwise complicated.”5
Obviously, bingeing by itself is no guarantee of quality. After spending $100 million on two seasons of House of Cards, Sarandos turned around and dropped another $200 million on the instantly forgettable Marco Polo in 2014. But astonishing as the towering monuments of HBO’s golden age were and are, there’s little doubt that the bingeing model established a floor, if not a peak, of quality. In some ways, however, it was too good for its own good.
Writer-showrunners Robert and Michelle King, who wrote and ran The Good Wife and have worked for network, cable, and streaming, feel that streaming and especially bingeing have distended shows, eroding the narrative discipline of linear TV, making them slower and longer than they need to be. Robert King, in particular, feels that once liberated from the discipline of stand-alone episodes, the new, looser series format often feels too too—too many episodes, too many seasons—wearing out its welcome. For example, streaming bloat ruined the series finale of the otherwise entertaining You. An episode of the second half of Netflix’s Stranger Things in 2022 ran an hour and twenty-five minutes, while the finale ran two hours and twenty minutes. “Streaming is like most things,” King says. “If you’re given too many, you’ll break them, and I think one of the things we’ve broken is the streaming experience, because this whole idea that a series is like an eight-hour movie—I would never sit through an eight-hour movie.”6
Another unique thing about Netflix was its culture, fashioned with the help of Hastings’s good friend Patty McCord, with whom he drove to work every day and socialized on weekends. He made her head of HR. Employees were paid top salaries, gifted with unlimited expense accounts and vacation time, and encouraged to candidly and publicly disagree with and/or criticize one another, including their bosses. There were no executive dining rooms; the highest of the high, including Hastings and Sarandos, and the lowest of the low sat tray to tray in the company’s cafeterias, facilitating the goal of company-wide transparency.
Erik Barmack arrived in 2015 from Disney-owned ESPN to be VP of international content. He was involved with developing or acquiring shows like The Witcher, Money Heist, Dark, and so on. He explains, “With Money Heist, some network executive would have said, ‘We can’t have 80 percent of the show in a bank vault because people are going to get bored.’” As for Squid Game, which aired years later, “‘We can’t have the opening scene where half the cast gets gunned down by machine guns.’”7
Barmack continues, “In the early years there was more of a tech company culture. It was less hierarchical than traditional media companies. There was a lot of autonomy in buying. Within my team, there were probably ten to fifteen people who could commission shows without really needing approvals.” He reported to Sarandos. with whom he had weekly meetings, “but as we went from a couple shows to a hundred-plus projects, it wasn’t like he was reviewing every show, or there was some kind of green light committee where everything was costed out against a budget. It was more like he would say, ‘Oh, okay, you’re doing a romance in France.’”8
Jenna Boyd moved from Nickelodeon to Netflix in 2017, where she was the executive in charge of original series in the children’s division. She brought in Avatar: The Last Airbender, among other shows. Looking for a change, she didn’t even consider Disney, because, she says, “We were getting all this research back about how kids were loving Netflix and YouTube and they were just leaving the linear world. It was done. At Nickelodeon, everything was a secret. At Netflix, every single company memo or strategy as well as financial information was available. You couldn’t do anything at Netflix without somebody having an opinion about it that they shared with you and everyone else. The intention of the feedback was to have really incredible type A players not be assholes. It was really cool.”9
In exchange for freedom and autonomy, Netflix demanded only that employees put the good of the company ahead of their own personal needs. It expected them to behave like grown-ups who could be trusted to supervise themselves and refrain from abusing the goodies Netflix so freely dispensed. As McCord summed it up, “Hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults.”10
The “Netflix Way” was brilliant but implacable. The company regarded itself as a “dream team,” not a family, which is to say that hard work, loyalty, and friendships were subordinate to performance—and even performance, no matter how stellar, delivered no guarantee of continued employment unless accompanied by innovation, which Hastings prized above all things. In other words, Netflix treated its approximately 11,300 employees like male cicadas. Once they finish the job for which they are hired, they are fired, unless their performance was outstanding—and innovative.
By January 2019, Hastings and Sarandos had grown the company so fast that total chaos reigned. “The volume ambitions were massive,” Boyd recalls. Volume was important, Sarandos explains, because it not only provides something for everyone but builds a library. And, Boyd continues, the rapid growth “spurred this incredible culture of feeling like ‘Oh, I work in the kids’ division, but I could do this other kind of show because I found something fantastic.’ So, ‘Let’s do it.’ But it was incredibly confusing pitching multiple executives. There were no budgets. Every division was scaling up and there was a lot of overlap. There needed to be a come-to-Jesus moment recognizing everybody can’t do everything. That’s when a lot of reorganizing needed to happen.”11 Eventually, Boyd was reorg-ed out of her job.
From a strictly ethical and rational point of view, it was laudable, but Hastings’s attempt to inspire his employees to be their best selves sometimes brought out their worst selves. The aspirational slogans about candor, transparency, and so on turned out to have a dystopian side. Instead of doing their best because they should, they did it because they were afraid—afraid of being fired if they didn’t. In one instance, a woman in tears, having just been terminated, was packing up her boxes, while the rest of her team ignored her because they were afraid that “helping her would put a target on their back,” explained an employee.12 Some managers apparently felt driven to fire people lest they be regarded as soft and get fired themselves.
“Maxing up candor,” in Netflix-speak, required getting rid of “normal polite human protocols” in favor of a Darwinian approach that favored the survival of the fittest.13 Erin Meyer, who helped Hastings write his book, No Rules Rules, compared the Netflix Way to The Hunger Games. Employees were subject to the “Keeper Test,” which Hastings used not only to weed out hardworking but average performers, but also, in his words, “complainers and pessimists. Most of them would have to go.”14
The Keeper Test requires the managers of various divisions to ask themselves how hard would they fight to keep someone. If the answer is “not that hard,” that employee is history.15 The culture of candor also demands that the blemishes and faults of newly departed employees be “sunshined” for the edification of their peers in company-wide assemblies.
Ironically the Netflix Way eventually claimed McCord herself, who was known as the “Queen of the Good Goodbye” for the exemplary way she had fired scores of employees over the course of her fourteen years with the company. Hastings even fired mathematician Neil Hunt, who was at Netflix from the very start, a close friend and one of the brains behind the company’s algorithms. Nevertheless, many employees valued their tenure at the company even after they were keepered out the door.
Despite Hastings’s high-minded words about candor, he quickly lowered the flag, excusing himself from responsibility when Saudi Arabia pressured Netflix to withdraw an episode of a series called Patriot Act that included some not-so-nice things about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely alleged to have ordered the dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “We’re not trying to do truth to power,” he airily asserted. “We’re trying to entertain.”16 (Hastings did go on to point out that Netflix retained the offending episode on YouTube.)
On the other hand, one source praises the company for its dedication to diversity. “It’s actually taking funds and putting them into Black-run space versus not just saying, ‘We want diversity.’ I sit in the creative leadership meetings for the animation department, and it’s one of the most diverse rooms I’ve ever been in in my life.”17 Netflix joined scores of CEOs denouncing the state of Georgia’s voter suppression laws in 2021, and the following year over its anti-abortion laws. But as of 2023, Netflix is shooting Back in Action, Collateral Data, Six Triple Eight, A Family Affair, The Electric State, etc., etc.18
When Sarandos decided to get Netflix into original programming, it didn’t just get its toes wet. With characteristic bravado, it jumped in with both feet. House of Cards was a big bite for one year, but Netflix had a big stomach. Jenji Kohan had an overall deal with Lionsgate, and had written a number of scripts for Kevin Beggs. Among them was Orange Is the New Black, based on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir, which Lionsgate optioned for her. Kerman was a blonde, WASPy Smith College graduate who did thirteen months of a fifteen-month sentence in Connecticut’s Danbury Federal Correctional Institution for delivering a suitcase full of drug money for her heroin-trafficking girlfriend on behalf of a colorful Nigerian drug lord.
Kerman might not have been among Smith’s finest, but her book had Kohan’s name written all over it, providing the showrunner with an aha moment. In it, she saw the opportunity for a female version of Fontana’s Oz. She knew it would be catnip for an off-network service, constructed as it was around a favorite Hollywood trope: a fish out of water, in this case Kerman—her Trojan mare. “If you go to a network and say, ‘I wanna do prison stories about Black women and Latino women and old women,’ you’re not gonna make a sale,” she explains. “But, if you’ve got this blonde girl going to prison, you can get in there, and then you can tell all the stories. I just thought it was a terrific gateway drug into all the things I wanted to get into.”19
Still, Orange was not an easy sell. Kohan took it to her home, Showtime, which was airing Weeds, and expected a warm welcome. But the cabler, she recalls, “said ‘No.’ So fuck them!”20 Why? “When I first heard about it, it was very much about the upper-middle-class white woman going to jail,” says David Nevins. “What ultimately made the show sing were all the other characters. And they were definitely not as evident in the initial pitch.” Beyond that, he concludes, “Sometimes you just miss.”21
It was 2011, the trades were ballyhooing Fincher’s deal with Netflix, and Kohan thought, “Why not?” She explains, “I had come through decades of the pilot system, which I always felt was stupid and inefficient. And here was this new thing saying, ‘Let’s shoot the whole season’—and with a respectable budget.”22 Netflix excited her, she explained at the time, because “It’s the Wild West. You can do what you want. What could be bad?”23
Orange was different from Weeds. Instead of one good-bad girl, why not a prison full of them? It was also totally different from House of Cards, its opposite in theme and approach. There was no Netflix brand. Rather, it was a platform, and the more disparate its shows the better. Nobody says, “I love Netflix for its teenage romances, or its Mafia series.” Netflix was all four networks plus cable rolled into one.
Sarandos credited Cindy Holland, VP of original content, with seeing the potential of Kohan’s show. Netflix committed to the series instantly, in the room. “That was miraculous,” she says. “That is every showrunner’s dream, to just ‘go to series.’”24
At that time, Netflix didn’t know what it was doing, knew it didn’t know what it was doing, and for the most part did nothing. Kohan continued, “Their opening statement was: ‘You’ve done TV before, we haven’t. Show us.’”25 She praised Netflix executives for not “pissing in the corners.”26 Netflix and Kohan were a match made in heaven. Disrupters in love.
Casting Piper, in Kohan’s words, “was enormously challenging because I wanted that Americana ice queen . . . the cool WASP, privileged white girl. Usually, women in that package aren’t funny, and Taylor [Schilling] is. She’s actually a hot girl who can do comedy, which is like a unicorn.”27
After Schilling, in casting the other actors, Kohan was treated to an embarrassment of riches. “The pools of talent are so deep when you have a call for Latin women or Black women or a middle-aged woman because they never get their shot,” she explains.28 Jen Euston, the casting director, adds that these were “character actors, women who weren’t stick-thin, women who weren’t ‘beautiful.’ The satisfaction in getting . . . actresses I’ve known for years cast into roles that weren’t just ‘Nurse No. 1’—roles that had names, history and arcs that became series regulars—I’ve never been asked to cast that before.”29
There were few if any transgender actors on TV when Laverne Cox, who had tried to commit suicide when she was eleven, got the role of Sophia, the Black trans hairdresser. Attacked by anti-gay protestors, Sarandos recalled seeing the god hates fags signs they held aloft at an Oscar ceremony. Eventually Cox got her own sign: the cover of Time magazine.
Lea DeLaria, who plays the ultrabutch Big Boo, says, “I would have given my left nut to work with the creator of Weeds.” She adds, “Lesbians on American television are usually pretty and feminine, or hard sexy girls. They are most often doing each other to the delight of the 16-to-24-year-old straight male audience for whom these images are created.” She looked around her set and said, “This set is like a dyke bar,”30 adding “girls lick girls here.” Indeed, the characters satisfied their sexual needs in a variety of novel and inventive ways. Whatever taboos Kohan had left standing in Weeds, she knocked down here. Nudity was ho-hum. There was fisting, squirting, dildos, and masturbation.
Kohan gave each and every one of her characters a humanizing backstory, even the Margaret Thatcher of the prison kitchen who feeds our girl Piper a used tampon sandwich to get even with her for something or other. The theme of the show, in Kohan’s words, was: “You are not your crime.”31
No attempt was made to prettify the actors. Said Selenis Leyva, who played Gloria Mendoza, “We have no makeup on . . . They give you bigger pores, or highlight a pimple or bags under your eyes. We all look bad.”32 Kohan’s characters would have been less at home in the pages of Vogue than National Geographic.
With no censors or advertisers to worry about, Kohan took the show where none had gone before, exploring issues like sexual fluidity, gender bias, body shaming, punishment for profit, the criminalization of poverty, racism, you name it. It was all safely nested within the protective conventions of a prison drama that allowed—nay, demanded—all those goodies that audiences expected from that genre: violence, rape, beatings, stabbings, murder, and, last but not least, black humor. Female prisoners, no matter what they looked like, had permission to be funny.
For all Kohan’s dismissal of political correctness, Orange is steeped in contemporary, real-world conflict. In 2016, two years after Eric Garner died in a choke hold and four years before the death of George Floyd, Kohan devoted Season 4 to Black Lives Matter. Fan favorite Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), a tiny Black woman, is crushed to death by a large white male guard who places his knee on her back. Still, in Kohan’s universe, character and the integrity of the story—that is, entertainment—come first, not issues. If the prisoners are more than their crimes, so are the most sadistic and racist guards.
Orange Is the New Black premiered on July 11, 2013, to rave reviews. Shonda Rhimes had just launched Grey’s Anatomy when she met Kohan. She had been a Weeds fangirl, but when she heard about Orange she was “suspicious”: “It seemed to be a show about a rich white woman’s prison struggles, written by a white woman, when we know that white women are not the majority of people being victimized, forgotten, and destroyed by the prison system.” But, she went on, “There are stories told on that show from the perspectives of women of color—and trans women and lesbians—that I don’t think I’d ever seen before.”33
Kohan’s show was the sleeper among Netflix’s handful of new series, promoted with whatever scraps it had left over from its higher-profile originals, but it became the streamer’s most watched series and one of the most original series ever to appear on the small screen. The first season of Orange was nominated for twelve Emmys and won three. Kohan, naturally, doesn’t put much stock in awards. As she put it, “They can all fuck themselves.”34
For Netflix, Orange was the new green, driving up its stock price from under $60 a share in 2012 to over $400 a share in 2013. Of course, skyrocketing share prices had to be balanced against the cost of originals plus licensing fees for its movies, amounting to a $58 million negative cash flow in 2012. But Netflix was a company that, even when it was broke, never shied away from going for broker.
Just as important, Orange firmed up the streamer’s reputation for providing a warm welcome for creatives. Says Holland, “There was some expectation that House of Cards would be good because of David Fincher—not because of us. There was a lot of chatter in the industry that you can get lucky once. Orange proved we weren’t just a one-trick pony.”35
