Inside Netflix’s Quest to Become a Global TV Giant1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteNetflix’s Bela Bajaria first came up in the entertainment industry in the mid-1990s as an assistant at CBS, after mailing letters to “hundreds of people” in the Hollywood Creative Directory. She relished the development process and reading the latest drafts of scripts, which she calls the most formative part of her early Hollywood education. But often what wound up on-screen didn’t align with what she pictured on the page.
“I would read a script sometimes and imagine lots of different-looking people in that script or in that family setting, and then see [a cast of] primarily white actors,” says the executive responsible for bringing to fruition shows such as The Mindy Project and the Queer Eye reboot. “When I read a script, I imagine a brown girl as the hero of the story. Everybody [has] their own descriptive bias or their own frame of reference when they read something, so I think all of this comes into play taking on a job of doing local-language originals. I’m really being an advocate and really wanting people’s authentic stories told.”
Image Credit: Variety
