If Ted Sarandos wants to continue to attract great artists such as Dave Chappelle, he shouldn’t listen to woke bullies who want veto power over jokes.
If Ted Sarandos wants to continue to attract great artists such as Dave Chappelle, he shouldn’t listen to woke bullies who want veto power over jokes.
N etflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos had the right idea last week when he defended the streaming service’s decision to air Dave Chappelle’s standup special The Closer. In internal messages to employees, he said he understood their concerns about Chappelle’s (mild) jokes about transgenderism but didn’t think the special crossed a line. He dismissed the idea that Chappelle’s words constituted, or could reasonably be construed to incite, violence. He said people had to learn to live with others who hold differing points of view. He said that Chappelle was a mainstay of Netflix who is extremely popular with viewers and that he didn’t believe in censoring artists.
Yesterday, Sarandos fed all of those entirely correct ideas into the shredder and begged the mob for forgiveness. It won’t work. Does it ever?
“To be clear,” he told the Wall Street Journal in a craven climbdown late Tuesday, “storytelling has an impact in the real world . . . sometimes quite negative.” He said he “screwed up” when he sent the internal emails described above because, “What I should have led with in those emails was humanity.” He added that, “I should have recognized the fact that a group of our employees was really hurting.”
This amounted to throwing a tub of bloody chum into a shark-infested sea. By apologizing, Sarandos has now abandoned his principles and conceded his adversaries’ claims. Since both sides are now in agreement that Sarandos “screwed up,” surely they’re in agreement that something must be done. In attempting mollification, Sarandos has made matters worse. In seeking to tamp down media interest, he has given reporters a reason to file new and more outraged stories. In framing himself as a kind of emotional cocktail waitress for whom it is a central duty to find out what will assuage his employees’ troubled souls and deliver it to them on a tray, he has conceded that he is not really the boss. Netflix is now, like a woke college campus, an upside-down company in which the bottom tells the top what to do. Sarandos is in a poor position to tell the mob, “I’m in charge, and if you don’t like how I make decisions, the door is over there” when he has just confessed to a deficit of “humanity.” He has set a precedent in which any handful of activists upset about any of the thousands of programs Netflix offers can plant a few stories in the media and force Sarandos to his knees.
An activist group at Netflix has already delivered an undergraduate-style list of absurd demands; the employees want trans people hired for senior leadership roles and a disclaimer to be attached to The Closer warning viewers that it “contains transphobic language, misogyny, homophobia, and hate speech.” Until Tuesday, Sarandos could simply have ignored all of this or said, “Thanks for the input, and we’ll take this under advisement.” But now that he admits he’s a guy who “screwed up” and failed the test of “humanity,” the activists have every reason to expect that he will deliver concrete action. “I apologize” begets “Then how will you make amends?” Don’t do the former unless you have an answer for the latter.
A group of some unknown number of Netflix employees had planned a temporary walkout at the company’s headquarters on Sunset Boulevard today, but after the company fired someone for leaking sensitive internal data to the media last week, staffers had reason to believe that taking a stance in opposition to their own employer might be a bit risky. Sarandos’s decision to grovel, though, amounted to an invitation to all employees to publicly dispute company decisions — today, tomorrow, and always. In order to show solidarity and “humanity,” Sarandos might as well walk out on himself.
Until Tuesday, the internal activists were flailing. They hadn’t won much backing from Hollywood talent. Hardly anyone of any note so much as sent out a tweet of support. No stars vowed to sever their relationships with Netflix. The story was dying out. The world was about to move on, implicitly agreeing with what Sarandos told employees last week: “Our goal is to entertain the world, which means programming for a diversity of tastes.”
Chappelle’s remarks may not be to everyone’s liking, but his brand is built on causing controversy. He is deliberately, intentionally, aggressively provocative. He sprinkles his routines with promises such as, “It’s gonna get worse than that, hang in there.” The easily provoked should simply decline to pay attention to him. If they think his comments do harm, they should stop amplifying them. And if Sarandos wants to continue to attract great artists such as Chappelle, he shouldn’t indulge the bullying of woke mobs.