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      How Netflix’s Corporate Culture Has Changed

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      The company’s latest internal memo about its corporate culture is more about how it expects employees to behave than what it wants to become.Netflix has long been a company known for its secrets: no Nielsen ratings, little feedback on why shows are canceled, no box office numbers for the rare movies that are actually released in theaters.Yet for a place defined by its opaque approach to the outside world, the streaming giant has long been aggressively transparent internally. The company’s philosophy was immortalized in 2009 when Reed Hastings, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, first laid out the corporate ethos in a 125-slide presentation that introduced new buzzy phrases like “stunning colleagues,” “the keeper test” and “honesty always.”The presentation, with its insistence on constant and unfiltered candor, felt both brutal and refreshingly antithetical to Hollywood’s normal way of doing business. To the frustration of former employees and current competitors, it may just be the blueprint that has enabled Netflix to have so much success while its rivals have stumbled.Three more culture memos have followed over the years. Before being released, they are pored over and analyzed for months by top executives. At the same time, any employee can pop into the Google Doc where the memo is being assembled to leave a thought or a comment.The latest iteration of the document, which was released internally on May 8 and will soon be made public, underwent eight months of vetting and received 1,500 comments from employees, according to Sergio Ezama, Netflix’s chief talent officer. It is five pages long (half the length of Mr. Hastings’s final memo in 2022), and some core tenets have changed, however slightly.When Mr. Hastings titled his 2009 presentation “Netflix Culture,” he gave it the subhead “Freedom and Responsibility.” The idea was that Netflix trusted its employees to act in the best interest of the company. If you want a vacation, take a vacation. If you have a baby and need to go on leave, go on leave. Documents were shared widely throughout the company without any fear of leaks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Black Barbie: A Documentary’ Review: Becoming the Main Character

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      A new Netflix documentary explores what led to the release of Black Barbie in 1980, both celebrating her existence and recognizing her limitations.For more than four decades, Lagueria Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, worked at Mattel. Davis, the director of the new Netflix documentary “Black Barbie,” was not a fan of dolls, but was drawn to the subject by her aunt, who is a devoted collector.On the surface, the documentary is about what led to the 1980 release of Black Barbie, but the issues it explores run much deeper: the harm of lacking a “social mirror,” the slow pace of progress and the tensions around darkening a white fictional character.There were already Black dolls in the Barbie universe before Black Barbie, but all were ancillary — friends of Barbie’s. The Black version of Barbie, created by the company’s first Black designer, Kitty Black Perkins, was meant to be a main character.What is most interesting about the documentary is the question of whether Black Barbie ever managed to escape her predecessors’ marginalization, as white Barbie remains the standard. Does society need Black versions of white cultural products or new products in which Blackness is centered?Featuring a wide range of Mattel employees, academics, cultural commentators and women who have had Barbies made in their image, such as the Shondaland founder Shonda Rhimes, the ballerina Misty Copeland and the fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, Davis complicates our understanding of Black Barbie, both celebrating her existence and recognizing her limitations.“Black Barbie” looks at a Black toy company that produced multiracial dolls and a line within Mattel that was focused on stand-alone Black characters, created by Stacey McBride-Irby, a protégée of Perkins. Staying with these scenes a little longer, exploring what worked and did not, would have expanded the conversations taking place in the film and the dissonance inherent in trying to make a white doll Black.Black Barbie: A DocumentaryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Television

      How ‘The Boys’ Imagines Fascism Coming to America

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      “The Boys” and other TV series imagine fascism coming to America, whether wrapped in the flag or in a superhero’s tights.What would fascism look like in America? A quote long misattributed to Sinclair Lewis says that it would come “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” The comedian George Carlin said that it would come not “with jackboots” but “Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.”“The Boys,” Amazon Prime Video’s blood-spattered, dystopian superhero satire, has another proposal: It would be handsome, jut-jawed and blond. It would wear a cape. And it would shoot lasers out of its eyes.Homelander (Antony Starr) is the star-spangled, nihilistic and enormously popular leader of the Seven, a for-profit league of superheroes produced through bioengineering and drug injections by Vought, a corporation founded by a Nazi scientist. To the public, he is the chiseled personification of national virtue. Behind the scenes, he is a bully, a murderer, a rapist — and, as of the new season, possibly America’s imminent overlord.In Season 4, Homelander goes on trial for murdering an anti-supe protester. He runs ads asking for help against “his toughest opponent yet: Our corrupt legal system.” Amazon StudiosIn the bizarro America of “The Boys,” “supes” are only incidentally crime fighters. They’re valuable corporate I.P., pitching products, starring in movies and reality shows and lending their images to puppet shows and holiday ice pageants. They’re the world’s biggest celebrities, towering on billboards and omnipresent on Vought’s media platforms, and this gives the Seven a power greater than any super-speed or heat vision.When the series begins, however, Homelander is limited, by politics — the government has resisted using supes in the military — and by his deep-seated need for love and approval. Power breeds suspicion (“The Boys” takes its title from an anti-supe vigilante group whose exploits it follows), and Vought is constantly monitoring the Seven’s approval ratings and guarding against backlash. Homelander may be invincible, but he still has to answer to corporate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution’ Review: Beyond the Punchline

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      A new Netflix documentary showcases comedy as a source of queer liberation, featuring Margaret Cho, Tig Notaro, Joel Kim Booster and more.The director Page Hurwitz examines comedy’s place in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement in the new Netflix documentary “Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution,” creating a rich, century-long timeline full of archival footage, behind-the-scenes glimpses and candid interviews with comedians. A standout subject is the 82-year-old trailblazer Robin Tyler, the first out lesbian on national TV.Throughout the film, Hurwitz showcases comedy as more than just a source of laughter, but of healing, catharsis and as an agent for queer liberation, particularly during the Stonewall riots in 1969 and, later, the AIDS epidemic.L.G.B.T.Q. comedians were already on hand for “Outstanding” — in 2022, many of them, including Lily Tomlin, Wanda Sykes and Billy Eichner, performed on the same stage during “Stand Out: An LGBTQ+ Celebration,” a Netflix standup special hosted by Eichner. The backstage footage from that special captured something that feels revolutionary, echoing Margaret Cho’s assertion that “queer comedy was really a solace” when she achieved fame in the 1990s.Many of the best moments in “Outstanding” occur when it draws connections between idols and admirers. A simple moment between Joel Kim Booster and Cho is made powerful through thoughtful editing: Cho, in a voice-over, describes the joy that queer comedy can evoke as we see Booster experiencing it among his peers.The film also addresses transphobic jokes by comedians like Dave Chappelle and Bill Maher, and ends with an acknowledgment of the anti-transgender bills being passed nationwide.“There’s no such thing as just kidding,” Tyler, the pioneering comedian, says. “So if anybody does homophobic jokes, they mean it.” The fight is still no laughing matter.Outstanding: A Comedy RevolutionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Dancing for the Devil’: A Cult Docuseries That Takes Its Time

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      This three-part Netflix documentary examines the supposed scheme to exploit TikTok dancers — and proves why cult narratives shouldn’t be rushed.There’s a train wreck quality to most documentaries about cults, an invitation to crane your neck at weird rituals, bizarre leaders and peculiar anecdotes. By nature, cults are insular, inscrutable and strange to outsiders. But for those on the inside, every teaching and action seems to follow a logic, to make sense. That’s sort of the point.I’ve watched a lot of cult documentaries in the past years, and so have a lot of Americans — they’re adjacent to true crime, which makes them perfect streaming fodder. Like many people, I settled in to watch Derek Doneen’s three-part documentary series “Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult” (streaming on Netflix) because I realized I’d seen some of the dancers on my own social media feeds, and was baffled to discover that lighthearted dancing to popular oldies could be cultish behavior.To my surprise, the series made its case by digging behind headlines, exposing how the supposedly controlling and manipulative pastor Robert Shinn found ways to dominate his church members for decades, long before the advent of TikTok. Parishioners tell stories that are disturbing, especially for anyone who’s had sustained contact with high-control religious groups — tales of abuse, extortion, grooming and worse. The series claims that Shinn most recently started a talent management company (called 7M) and attracted beautiful, aspirational young people, and then filched their earnings and kept them under his thumb. (Shinn did not participate in the documentary and denies wrongdoing.) Former 7M dancers as well as former church members describe the tactics they say he used to exploit them. They are chilling.I happen to know a lot of people who’ve been in cults, some of whom managed to leave, so I’m extra sensitive to a common flaw of cult documentaries: Sometimes they focus more on the train wreck than on those the train wrecked. This is particularly an issue in feature-length documentaries — it’s tough, in two hours, to explain the entire story and center the survivors, rather than the perpetrator.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adria Arjona on ‘Hit Man’ and How the Production Surprised Her

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      The actress, who stars with Glen Powell, said that with the contract-killer movie, her ideas were finally valued in a writer’s room.Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead.Adria Arjona doesn’t like doing what she’s told.The co-star of the new Netflix romantic action comedy “Hit Man,” Arjona accompanied her father, the Guatemalan Mexican singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona, on tour from the time she was young. It was a musical mentorship opportunity, so she ended up deciding early on: Music was out.He also made her read the poems of Pablo Neruda and the work of Gabriel García Márquez, so naturally, she said, all she wanted to do was listen to ’N Sync.“I do everything backwards,” Arjona, 32, said on a recent weekday morning over sparkling water at the Whitby Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “That’s just my personality — I just listen to my intuition. It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose or trying to be rebellious.”In “Hit Man,” directed by Richard Linklater, Arjona is Madison Masters, a desperate housewife who tries to hire a hit man, played by Glen Powell, unaware he’s a police operative. The rapturously reviewed movie is the latest entry in a 12-year-long acting career that has suddenly become white hot.She broke out in 2022 as the mechanic Bix Caleen in the streaming “Star Wars” series “Andor,” playing Cassian Andor’s fearless friend. (Season 2 of the Disney+ series, which she’s finished filming, is expected next year.) She also appeared as the betrothed daughter in the 2022 reboot of “Father of the Bride,” after roles in “Pacific Rim: Uprising” and Season 2 of “True Detective.”Arjona with Glen Powell in “Hit Man,” the Netflix action romantic comedy.Brian Roedel/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in June

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      The final season of “Sweet Tooth” and a Richard Linklater rom-com highlight this month’s slate.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of June’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Sweet Tooth’ Season 3Starts streaming: June 6Based on the writer-artist Jeff Lemire’s acclaimed comic book series, this fantastical drama has for the past two seasons followed a plucky human-animal hybrid named Gus (Christian Convery) as he has journeyed through a postapocalyptic America with the burly nomad Tommy Jepperd (Nonso Anozie), making new friends and enemies. Following Lemire’s plot (with some variations), the “Sweet Tooth” writer-producer Jim Mickle has repeatedly raised the stakes for Gus, Jepperd and all the mutant children and helpful humans they’ve picked up along the way. Season 3 will wrap up their story, as our heroes seek a safe haven from all the world’s violent, pitiless ravagers while also looking for the root cause of the devastating plague and mass mutation event that upended the social order.‘Hit Man’Starts streaming: June 7Glen Powell co-wrote and stars in this shaggy romantic comedy, based loosely on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. Powell plays Gary Johnson, a New Orleans college professor who moonlights with the local police department as an undercover operative, posing as a killer-for-hire in order to catch the kind of people who would hire a hit man. When he falls for Madison (Adria Arjona), one of his would-be clients, Gary risks crossing over to the other side of the law. The “Hit Man” co-writer and director Richard Linklater is known for the laid-back vibes of his movies like “Bernie” (also based on a Hollandsworth article) and “Dazed and Confused.” Though the plot here takes some classic film noir turns, Linklater and Powell are just as interested in hanging out with Gary and Madison, watching closely as their passion for each other leads to some questionable decisions.‘Bridgerton’ Season 3, Part 2Starts streaming: June 13Each “Bridgerton” season so far has adapted a different Julia Quinn novel, each telling a story focused primarily on the romantic ups and downs of one member of a Regency-era London family. Season 3 — which debuted its first four episodes in May and is debuting its final four in June — is no exception, covering the love life of Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton), as recounted originally in Quinn’s book “Romancing Mister Bridgerton.” But the season’s true main character thus far has been the woman Colin is slowly circling: Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan), an often overlooked spinster who throughout the series has secretly been the scandal-mongering gossip columnist Lady Whistledown. The season’s second half will resolve this complicated love story, while also potentially setting up Season 4 via a subplot about the brainy, witty, romance-averse Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie).‘A Family Affair’Starts streaming: June 28Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman play unlikely lovers in this romantic comedy, written by Carrie Solomon and directed by the rom-com vet Richard LaGravenese (the screenwriter of “The Fisher King” and “Water for Elephants”). Efron is Chris Cole, a middle-aged action movie superstar feeling increasingly cut off from the real world. Kidman is Brooke Harwood, an older writer who feels an immediate and thrilling connection with Chris from the first time they meet. The complication? Brooke’s daughter Zara is Chris’s frazzled personal assistant, who was on the verge of quitting before her mom and her boss hooked up. These three people are under a lot of pressure in their personal and professional lives, and “A Family Affair” is about how they have to learn to be honest with each other about what they really want.‘The Mole’ Season 2Starts streaming: June 28Though it is technically the seventh season (counting the five that ran on ABC in the early 2000s), the latest edition of the reality competition “The Mole” is the second since the American version of the show moved to Netflix in 2022. Based on a Belgian series that has been copied around the world, “The Mole” has a dozen strangers working together to win money by solving puzzles and performing feats of physical strength — all while one member of their party is covertly trying to sabotage them. The new season is set in Malaysia and hosted by Ari Shapiro, who also administers a quiz at the end of every challenge and sends one underperforming player home. As always, a big part of the show’s appeal is that the audience can play along at home, trying to guess the identity of the Mole before the final episode.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: ‘Dirty John,’ ‘The Puppet Master’ and More

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      Four picks across television, film and podcasting that explore a devastating, yet slippery, type of manipulation.The concept of “coercive control” entered the lexicon about a decade ago and has become an increasingly prevalent theme in the true crime genre. Pioneered by Evan Stark, a researcher and expert on domestic abuse, it refers to a pattern of abusive behavior and manipulation — including isolation, humiliation, financial abuse, stalking and gaslighting — used to dominate a partner. Men are most often, but not always, the abusers.Coercive control “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to hurt,” Stark, who died in April, said in a London court in 2019 while testifying on behalf of a domestic abuse victim who’d murdered her husband. She, appealing her conviction, was subsequently released from prison.Here are four picks across television, film and podcasting that show how this form of psychological abuse, though hard to prove as a crime, ruins lives.Podcast‘Sweet Bobby’Because I’ve watched every episode of the MTV show “Catfish,” I thought that this six-chapter investigative podcast from Tortoise Media, which explores a true story in which coercive control overlaps with catfishing (tricking others, often into a romantic relationship, using fake digital profiles), was unlikely to shock me.But the saga — about Kirat Assi, a woman from London whose life was turned on its head for nearly a decade after she fell for “Bobby” via Facebook — still managed to test my tolerance for how little legal recourse the deceived parties have. The story also speaks to why the damage caused by coercive control and by the proliferation of catfishing should not be minimized.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More