Hollywood Schadenfreude, Depp-Heard Fallout, NFT Carnage

Welcome back to the Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to what’s new at Puck.

First up, Matt Belloni elucidates the complicated image management behind Ted Sarandos’ masterly, schadenfreude-inducing, post-crash New York Times mea culpa.

Plus, below the fold, Eriq Gardner reveals the real loser in the Depp-Heard circus and the unlikely antecedent of Seth Green’s NFT drama. Julia Ioffe joins Peter to discuss the latest scandal rocking the Kremlin. And Teddy Schleifer stops by the pod to preview a secret billionaire powwow.

“Smart choice,” one veteran texted me. “Better for him to be on his front foot,” said another. “Was time to stop taking shit,” said yet another. “He covers a lot of territory here,” one said, meaning that when Ted is asked in the months ahead about Dave Chappelle or the advertising pivot or even the fate of lieutenants Scott Stuber and Bela Bajaria, he can now point to this piece, which sort of backs them (“I would say we are always reaching for the highest performance,” co-C.E.O. Reed Hastings says, “but our content is not why the current slowdown is happening”) while leaving room for personnel changes if needed.

But I keep thinking about the transparent strategy at play here, and the sentiment from other savvy observers was that this was all a bit much, and way too soon, especially during what should be a heads-down, focus-on-the-content moment for an embattled company. And the fact that Sarandos is even discussing in The New York Times whether he can pass his own ridiculous “Keeper Test” is already a loss. This piece, to me, is a fascinating window on the Netflix psyche: An overcompensation by innovative executives that are not used to bad press, care very deeply about their positioning among peers (and the elites that read the Times), and seem to be relying on a crisis P.R. handbook...