There wasn’t much to say about the outrage over Netflix airing Dave Chappelle’s special, The Closer, until I saw it and found out what all the outrage was about. Now I have, and I get it. It was Chappelle being Chappelle, as he’s always been and still was, and that’s the problem Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos faced.
Netflix Inc. Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos said he “screwed up” in his efforts to communicate with employees who were upset over “The Closer,” a recent comedy special by Dave Chappelle in which he made remarks that some viewed as offensive to the transgender community.
In emails to Netflix staff after the special’s debut earlier this month, Mr. Sarandos defended “The Closer,” citing its popularity on the platform and the company’s commitment to creative freedom. He also said the company believed “content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”
This wasn’t the first time employees of a company claimed that something said or written morphed into a real risk of physical harm to them. the argument being that if ideas that challenged their hegemony were put out into the world, gullible people would seize upon those ideas, translate them into hatred and go out and find people, in this case transgender people, and beat them, shoot them, kill them. Thus, words that could promote this chain of events had to be eradicated so people didn’t take to the streets to kill transgender people.
In “The Closer,” which was released earlier this month and is currently among the most-watched programs on the service in the U.S., Mr. Chappelle said “gender is a fact” and said he identified as a “TERF,” an acronym that stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” He also compared the transgender community to people who wear blackface.
The backlash was swift. A transgender employee, Terra Field, twitted their outrage and it went viral.
A day after the special’s release, Terra Field, a Netflix software engineer who is transgender, criticized the show on Twitter, saying Mr. Chappelle attacked “the trans community, and the very validity of transness.” The tweets went viral and led to a backlash inside the streaming giant over the special. Groups including LGBTQ-rights advocacy group GLAAD spoke up against the show, and the National Black Justice Coalition asked for Netflix to take the special off its platform.
Field and two other employees then crashed an online meeting of senior execs.
Netflix said Ms. Field wasn’t punished for her tweets, but she and two other employees got into hot water at Netflix when they attended an online meeting of senior Netflix executives last week without permission.
By “hot water,” they mean Field and the other employees were suspended, then reinstated when that wasn’t taken well online. Now Field has called for an employee walkout at Netflix.
A Netflix transgender-employee group is encouraging all employees to take Wednesday off as a form of protest against Netflix for its decision to continue to work with Mr. Chappelle and its reaction to their concerns.
Whether, and to what extent, that will happen remains to be seen, but it’s caused Sarandos to respond to their grievance.
Mr. Sarandos said his remarks on content not causing real-world harm was also an oversimplification and lacking in humanity.
“To be clear, storytelling has an impact in the real world…sometimes quite negative,” he said.
So?
“We have articulated to our employees that there are going to be things you don’t like,” Mr. Sarandos said. “There are going to be things that you might feel are harmful. But we are trying to entertain a world with varying tastes and varying sensibilities and various beliefs, and I think this special was consistent with that,” he added.
The Chappelle special is popular on Netflix. People want to watch it, perhaps because Dave Chappelle’s comedy is funny, biting, interesting and, did I mention, funny? But there was also a bitter edge to much of it, that Dave Chappelle doesn’t take kindly to those who grieved about his last comedy special, “Sticks and Stones,” which was similarly controversial. Chappelle’s comedy was always controversial, which was a big part of why his comedy worked and mattered. It’s not always controversial in the way someone like Terra Field demands.
Netflix, via Sarandos, has a problem. It can air content that plays into the woke genre, even though that’s becoming increasingly untenable as the rifts between “marginalized” groups is becoming increasingly apparent, even to those who refuse to admit it. Netflix can’t simultaneously assert that it will continue to air content that some might feel is harmful and yet concede that it will cause real-world harm. If it’s harming people, then it’s very much in the wrong. Netflix has a choice of what to air and choosing to air content that harms people is wrong and inexcusable.
But does it harm people to put ideas into the ether than do not adhere to the orthodoxy of transgender activists? If not, then why acquiesce to the claim that they are harming transgender people, they are erasing their existence, challenging their validity, causing people to go out and beat, kill, transgender people? Pick a side, Netflix.
It remains to be seen whether the walkout at Netflix will happen and what, if any, consequence it will have. It remains to be seen whether Sarandos will be co-CEO or lapdog to the outraged. These are employees, the people who cash his paychecks, who are also of the view that they get to tell him what to do, what content his company is allowed to air, and what ideas are permissible to be streamed to the company’s paying customers.
“I’m firmly committed to continue to support artistic freedom for the creators who work with Netflix and increase representation behind the screen and on camera,” he said, noting these goals may at times be in conflict with each other.
“We have to figure out how to navigate those challenges,” Mr. Sarandos said.
Good luck navigating those challenges, Ted. But remember, if viewers don’t want to watch content that meets the approval of your new content director, Terra Field, then the walkout won’t matter because there won’t be a company at which to be employed. No viral twits are going to compel people to pay for a streaming service that people don’t want to watch.
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