Ex Miss India Universe is behind Netflix’s biggest hits
A former Miss India Universe is deciding what the world watches on Netflix: a London-born exec who turned down Bollywood fame to work off-camera is behind the streaming giant’s biggest hits from Queer Eye to Squid Game.
The 52-year-old Bela Bajaria was promoted to Netflix’s content chief officer from her role as the head of global TV and now reportedly earns an eight-figure salary.
Ms Bajaria will be responsible to keep Netflix at the top of the streaming giants in her new job, which she told the New Yorker is ‘a big creative endeavour’ and added: ‘It’s about recognizing that people like having more’.
For her new job, Ms Bajaria will move into a new office in the Los Angeles headquarters called the Icon Building, which is 14 storeys high and resembles a Jenga game.
The building stands in the heart of old Hollywood, right next to the iconic old Warner Bros studios and a short walk away from the Paramount studios.
According to industry sources, Ms Bajaria’s salary is north of $16 million.
While studying at university, Ms Bajaria entered the Miss India California pageant, which led to her successes as Miss India USA and Miss India Universe in 1991. On the back of her pageant wins, she was offered an acting contract for a Bollywood studio which she turned down to look for work off-camera at film and TV studios instead.
She got a job at CBS as an assistant in their movies-and-miniseries department, reading scripts and spending a lot of time in their basement videotape library studying old films. In 1999, after working her way up at CBS, she commissioned a miniseries about Joan of Arc with Leelee Sobieski, which received 13 Emmy nominations. Three years later, she was promoted to run the department she first joined as an assistant.
After a few years at Universal television, which Ms Bajaria started at in 2011, she joined the new market for streaming services with a role at Netflix in 2016. She was leading Netflix into reality TV with programmes like Queer Eye in 2018 and later Tidying Up With Marie Kondo in 2019.
As the head of licensing and co-production, she increased subscription numbers by licensing old shows from other companies like The Office. In the same year as her success with Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Ms Bajaria became responsible for non-English programmes, which grew in popularity on the streaming platform.
In 2022, out of a total of 1,846 hours of original content, less than half of that – 800 hours – was being produced in the US and Canada. The rest, 1,046 hours, was produced in Netflix offices, or ‘eco-systems’ as they call them, around the world for mostly local audiences in a plethora of languages.
In her role as head of global TV content, which she was appointed to in 2020 after the old head Cindy Holland was fired, Ms Bajaria was overseeing all TV programming both in the US and abroad. As part of her job she travelled around the world to the different Netflix offices, spending two or three days at a time at one of their 26 outposts, for example in Seoul, Mumbai or Mexico City.
She brought hits like the show Squid Game or the French series Lupin to Netflix. According to industry insiders, Ms Bajaria has risen through the ranks not just for knowing what is good or not, but also for knowing what will appeal to subscribers and shareholders.
One former colleague said for Ms Bajaria’s profile in the New Yorker: ‘The thing is, she’s not an intellectual. She’s smart. There’s a difference. She’s bold, and that’s what it takes.’ Ms Bajaria herself described to the New Yorker her ideal Netflix show as being both ‘premium and commercial at the same time,’ which her vice president Jinny Howe refers to as ‘gourmet cheeseburgers’.
Her success in her new role as chief content officer depends on how many of those shows will be a hit with subscribers she is able to deliver.
