Netflix's 'Squid Game' Hero, Insurrection Amnesia, and Web3

Happy Monday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, our regular afternoon bulletin of the latest and greatest reportage across Puck.
 
Today, after crowning Adam Aron as Hollywood's villain of the year, Matt Belloni returns with a post-holiday appreciation of Bela Bajaria, the provocative Netflix V.P. who has become the lynchpin behind the streamer's unlikely hyper-success transforming international content into globalized, blockbuster hits.

Plus, below the fold, Baratunde Thurston reflects on the true meaning of Jan 6., the future of digital democracy, and what brings him hope in 2022.

Hollywood’s Hero of the Year Is…

Love her or hate her (and she’s got her share of detractors), Bela Bajaria has been key to turning Netflix’s international content into globalized hits.

You don’t need me to tell you that Squid Game was the biggest piece of professionally-created entertainment this year. Those staggering numbers—sampled by 142 million accounts in 90 countries (and finished by 87 million of them) in its first 23 days; 1.5 billion hours viewed in its first 28 days; the kind of global fandom usually reserved for soccer stars and Avengers movies—speak for themselves. The nine-episode, South Korean sci-fi thriller that Netflix bought for $22 million has created $900 million in value, according to internal documents that were revealed in October by Bloomberg, and its stars became subjects of everything from TikTok memes to Halloween costumes to a talent agency frenzy to sign them.

What’s most interesting to me isn’t that Squid Game happened, it’s that this kind of foreign super-breakout was inevitable, and that television success in the future will be defined mostly on these global terms. Anyone paying even casual attention can see what happened in 2021 as a flashing signpost of where this is all headed: Huge investments in local-language programming lead to mainstream-able hits that can be algorithmically promoted to a global audience that’s trained to embrace subtitles and foreign actors; that, in turn, will create nearly instant, exponential growth in consumption of that content. In other words: Massive f-ing hits. And hits translate into subscribers, perpetuating the virtuous cycle. 

That’s not breaking news. In some ways, this has always been the TV business: big, broad hits pay for all the busted pilots and wasted overall deals, eventually spraying cash across the entire industry. But now, with truly scaled platforms, and paying customers willing to sample whatever is served directly to them, it’s all happening way faster, way bigger...

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