Ted Sarandos admits He “Screwed Up” but still defends Special

Netflix’s stand-up comedy show special, Dave Chappelle’s “The Closer”, was all over in the news for having segments that joke about the discrimination against the African American community relative to the discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community.

Massive protests against the special have emerged from various corners, including Netflix’s workers, who are enraged by Chappelle’s jokes against the transgender community. 

The situation now seems to be gone out of hands, as there is a planned employee walkout at the streaming giant organized by trans and LGBTQ+ staffers, content creators and allies.

Keeping in mind, the streaming giant’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos’s first explanation given on Monday, when he tried to defend the special by sticking up to the “artistic freedom” of stand-up comedians was subsequently supplemented by a broader rationale: “content doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm” on his second message. 

Both messages have enraged the workers on a solid level that they are on board with the planned walking out. What has made this a headache for Netflix is that a segment of its employees is in open revolt by Sarandos’ decision to make Chappelle’s special available to stream, with a walkout at the company’s HQ scheduled for next week?

What is happening now at Netflix? How are the workers responding to the ongoing crisis?

The events around “The Closer” have represented a rare blunder for Sarandos and Netflix, whose deep pockets and warm relationships with talent have been transformative for the global entertainment sector for close to a decade. In his conversation with Variety, he admitted that he did “screw up” in handling employee concerns and talked more specifically about what the company does and does not consider hate speech.

Ted Sarandos apologized for internal memos to his staff ahead of a planned walkout by 1,000 Netflix employees. Sarandos previously insisted he wouldn’t remove Chappelle’s hit comedy special, The Closer, despite outrage from transgender employees over Chappelle’s transgender jokes. During a phone interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he stated that he could tell the people that he screwed up those two communications, but still, his stance hasn’t changed. Sarandos said he should have acknowledged that “a group of our (Netflix) employees were in pain” and “hurt” by the company’s decision to air the special.

The Protocol for defining Hate Speech at Netflix?

The co-CEO was questioned on how Netflix defines something as hate speech and the parameters being followed by the streaming company. He replied that Netflix is trying to support creative freedom and artistic expression among the artists at Netflix.

Sometimes, and we do make sure our employees understand this, because of that, because we’re trying to entertain the world, and the world is made up of folks with a lot of different sensibilities and beliefs and senses of humour and all those things, sometimes, there will be things on Netflix that you dislike. 

That you even find to be harmful. Where we’ll draw the line is on something that would intentionally call for physically harming other people or even remove protections. According to him, intent to cause physical harm crosses the line of hate speech.

The walkout of the workers at Netflix

Netflix employees did walk out today, Wednesday, October 21, 2021, in protest of Dave Chappelle’s special and its anti-transgender comments were joined by allies who chanted “Trans lives matter,” getting pushback from the counter-protesters who also showed up. 

A pre-noon rally at a Netflix office-studio complex drew about 100 people, most on the side of an estimated 30 workers at the streaming giant that joined in afterwards, with a few willing to identify themselves as Netflix employees, but everyone declined to provide their names.