The Ted Sarandos Set

Ted Sarandos (b. 1964) sits at a junction that did not exist thirty years ago. He runs a technology company that makes movies, and he married into Hollywood royalty when he wed Nicole Avant (b. 1968), daughter of the music executive Clarence Avant (1931-2023), the man they called the Black Godfather. That marriage tells you most of what you need to know about the set. It joins old entertainment money and civil-rights-era Black power brokerage to new streaming capital. Sarandos came up renting tapes at a video store in Phoenix. He now holds a CBE from King Charles and a seat on the board of the Academy Museum. The arc from clerk to knighted mogul is the story the set tells about itself, and it likes the story very much.
What do these people value? Taste, first. They believe they can tell good from bad, and they believe their judgment carries moral weight. A man who greenlights the right show feels he has done something for the culture, not just for the quarter. They value reach next. The Netflix line about enabling nearly the whole planet to watch at once is a religious statement dressed as a metrics report. To touch a billion people is the dream, and the dream flatters them as benefactors rather than merchants. They value access to power, and they trade in it. The set overlaps heavily with the Obama-era donor class, with the Aspen Institute fellowship circuit, with the philanthropy galas where studio chiefs and senators and museum trustees rotate through the same rooms. Sarandos hosted fundraisers. He sits where money, art, and politics meet, and he treats that seat as earned.
Their hero is the visionary operator. Not the artist alone, and not the suit alone, but the man who combines them. Reed Hastings (b. 1960) built the myth of the founder who disrupts an industry through nerve and culture, and Sarandos is the content man who proved the founder right by betting on House of Cards in 2013 when the town said streaming could not make prestige television. The heroic act in this world is the early, lonely, correct call. You saw what others missed. You backed it with capital. You were vindicated by scale. When Sarandos walked away from the $83 billion Warner Bros. bid this year and pocketed a breakup fee, he framed it as discipline, as the strength to set ego aside. That framing is itself a hero pose. The man who can walk away is stronger than the man who must win.
The status games run on a few currencies. Hits are the obvious one, but a single hit means less than a slate, because a slate proves you have a method and not just luck. Awards matter, and the set craves them, because awards convert commerce into legitimacy. Netflix spent years and fortunes chasing the Best Picture Oscar partly to buy entrance into a room that old Hollywood guarded. Proximity to talent is a currency. To be the executive a great director trusts, to be the one auteurs call, raises a man above the spreadsheet class. Philanthropy and board seats form another tier. A trusteeship at the museum, a fellowship at Aspen, a gala chairmanship, these certify that you have crossed from making money to stewarding culture. And political access sits at the top, because a man who can get a president on the phone has reached a height that no box office number alone confers.
Now the normative claims, the shoulds these people press on the world. They hold that storytelling shapes society and that broad, inclusive storytelling makes society better. The streamer should put more faces and more nations on the screen, and doing so reads as justice, not just market expansion into new subscriber territories. They hold that the gatekeepers of the old system were narrow and exclusionary and that the new platform democratizes who gets seen. They hold that the consumer should be served, and they invoke the consumer as a moral authority. Sarandos said this month that you do not run in the opposite direction of the American consumer, and he meant it as common sense and as ethics at once. Give people what they want, and you serve them. The claim hides the harder truth that giving people what they want and shaping what they want are the same act when you control the menu.
The essentialist claims sit underneath. The set believes some men simply have taste and most do not, that the gift to know what will land is real and rare and roughly inborn. They believe the creative and the commercial are not opposites but can be fused in the right kind of man, and they believe they are that kind. They hold an essentialist faith in the audience too, a sense that human beings everywhere share a hunger for story, that narrative is part of what a person is, which is why a show from Korea or Spain can travel the globe. This faith is sincere and it is also convenient, because it makes a worldwide subscriber business feel like the fulfillment of human nature rather than the conquest of attention. And they believe in disruption as a kind of natural law, that the old forms were destined to fall and the new ones destined to rise, which lets the winners read their victory as the working out of something deeper than their own ambition.
The set is generous, cosmopolitan, and convinced of its own decency. The harder thing to hold in view is that taste, reach, and stewardship are also the tools by which a handful of men decide what hundreds of millions of people watch tonight, and that the language of service and inclusion makes that power easier to hold and harder to question.