Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was recently on Nikhil Kamath’s WTF podcast, where he spoke about Netflix India’s content journey. But one of his comments about Sacred Games didn’t sit well with the show’s co-creator, Anurag Kashyap.
Sarandos said he wasn’t sure if starting Netflix India with Sacred Games was the right choice. He felt that maybe they should’ve gone with a more mass-appeal or popular show first to connect better with Indian viewers.
Reacting on Threads, Kashyap did not hold back. Sharing a news screengrab of Sarandos’ comments, he wrote, “He should have started with Saas Bahu .. he would have done well. Which he is doing now Z I always knew the tech guys are dumb when it comes to story telling but @tedsarandos is the definition of dumb is what I didn’t know . Good to discover that. This explains everything now.”
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On the podcast, Sarandos explained Netflix’s early challenges, “Our very first Indian original show was Sacred Games. And I thought, ‘This is going to be great. People in India love movies. This is a TV show that feels as big as a movie, it has movie stars.’ What’s interesting about it is that it was very, very novel, but what I didn’t understand that we were introducing a brand new kind of entertainment in a country the size of India.”
He added, “For me, if I did it all over again, would I have done Sacred Games a couple of years later, and did things that were more populist (instead)? Maybe. But we knew that India was going to be a slower journey to get to where we wanted to get to. But it’s a great prize, at the end of the day. The addressable market is growing in the next couple of years in India, so it’s exciting.”
Sacred Games marked Netflix’s first original Indian series, directed by Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane. Starring Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, it was widely praised when it premiered in 2018. Although the second season received mixed reviews and the show was eventually cancelled.
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