Ted Sarandos

Source: RTS

Ted Sarandos

Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos robustly defended Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd while speaking at the Royal Television Society (RTS) London conference today, announcing the streamer has just agreed a multi-year first-look deal with Gadd for scripted series.

Baby Reindeer won four Emmys at the weekend and has been a global hit for Netflix, according to the company. But the streamer is being sued for $170m by Fiona Harvey who allegedly inspired the stalker character Martha.

“We are about facilitating storytellers to tell their stories. This is Richard’s true story… I think he is a brilliant storyteller and told an incredible story…I’m very proud of Richard and proud of the story he told, the way he told it.

“Baby Reindeer is his true story… it is not a documentary. And there are elements of the story that have been dramatised. We’re watching it performed by actors on television. We think it is abundantly clear that there is dramatisation involved.”

Sarandos also said that “it’s a fairly British debate – this debate is not happening anywhere else in the world.”

Sarandos also used his RTS platform to praise the UK as a home for producing film and TV series.

He said the streamer’s top four rating shows worldwide from the first six months of 2024 were produced in the UK: Fool Me Once, Baby Reindeer, Bridgerton and The Gentleman. The four shows were watched a combined total of 360 million times, he said.

Sarandos said: “I’ve always thought of the UK as the birthplace of prestige television. It’s why Netflix invests more here in the UK than anywhere else outside of the United States.”

He said Netflix had invested $6bn in the UK creative industries since 2020, and had worked with over 30,000 cast and crew. “Today, we have over 100 productions active in the UK,” he said, citing Bridgerton and Thursday Murder Club and features My Oxford Year and Wake Up Deadman: A Knives Out Mystery.

He said the roots of UK creative industry success lay in its “great public service broadcasting system” and institutions for nurturing a wealth of talent, as well as regulation that supports creativity, investment in arts education and the UK’s ‘highly competitive tax incentive.”

Turning briefly to films, Sarandos reinforced the thinking behind Netflix’s strategy of launching its original movies directly on the platform rather than in cinemas.

“Right now, a lot of people debate our windowing of movies, that we don’t put them in theatres first before they go to Netlfix. What is unique to Netflix is that we have enough scale to do that. We can uniquely spend $200m on a film and have enough scale of viewership to put it directly to Netflix without trying to recover some of the economics in the theatre, which is a fairly inefficient way to do it.”

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