Ted Sarandos Praises Axed Bela Bajaria On Eve Of Peter Rice’s Netflix Debut

Five days after Bela Bajaria was fired as Netflix‘s Chief Content Officer and replaced by Peter Rice, Ted Sarandos had nothing but kind words for his former loyal lieutenant, kinda.

“Bela had an incredible decade-long run here,” the amped up co-CEO said on today’s Q3 earnings call, praising the decade-long employee “for all of her incredible contributions.”

Echoing a lot of the language that he used on the October 15 internal memo announcing Bajaria’s axing, Sarandos added: “She put a lot of great hits on the board. She led the teams through a lot of expansions of new types of content. She also did the hard work of building this incredible international team, who’s been making local for local content around the world, which has become a great competitive differentiator for us over the last decade.”

“So I just want to take that moment to to thank Bella.”

Bajaria was widely thought to be safe from the chopping block as Sarandos and Peters cut 1,000 jobs last week, including top tier execs like Film VP Doug Belgrad. That assumption of Bajaria’s staying power, encouraged by internal nods and winks, was proved wrong 24-hours later with the release that she was out. Film boss Dan Lin was already on thin ice himself and the ice cracked for the Lego producer on October 19. No replacement for Lin has yet to be unveiled, with the expectation Rice (AKA Sarandos) will be naming someone soon-ish.

On an afternoon that saw Netflix stock slide over 5% in after hours trading and a year that has seen the stock down 40%, Sarandos and co-CEO Greg Peters were “totally focused” as always. Focused on pitching the upcoming slate of originals, “core entertainment value,” engagement, partnerships like France’s TFI, live sports. The duo also appeared hyper-focused on ex-Disney exec Rice riding in on a corporate white horse next week to help clean up the joint. To that, for all the praise of Bajaria, there was much said about Rice and his relationships with talent and nothing in the specific realm about the former CCO.

Unlike that October 15 memo on Bajaria’s exit, Sarandos today did not mention any of the names of the big titles like Squid Game and the upcoming The Adventures of Cliff Booth (though both Sarandos and Peters couldn’t seem to say the name “Tarantino” enough), the ex-CCO brought to the platform.