User:JSFarman/sandbox/Bela Bajaria

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First at CBS as a long-time network executive, then as president of Universal Television—she has greenlit popular series such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Master of None, The Good Place, among several others. In short, she’s the woman who decides what you and I binge–watch every day. She is also a champion of equal representation

She moved to the United States as an eight-year-old from London. Her parents were born and raised in East Africa. “In the late seventies, they came here to chase the big American dream. They opened car washes and I worked with them over weekends. Having grown up around that environment has instilled a great sense of responsibility,” (Elle)

In a major overhaul at Netflix Inc., Bela Bajaria has been put in charge of global television and Cindy Holland, an architect of the streaming giant’s original-content strategy, is leaving, the company said Tuesday. In her new role, Ms. Bajaria will oversee all original series for Netflix around the globe. Ms. Bajaria, who joined Netflix in 2016, had previously been in charge of unscripted programming and international content, the latter of which has become a priority for Netflix over the past several years. (Wall Street Journal)

Bajaria’s career in the entertainment industry first began in the mid-1990s, when she joined American broadcaster CBS as an assistant. In a little under two decades, she was able to quickly climb up the ladder to become one of the highest ranking Indian-American executives in show business. Bajaria is a former Miss India USA, having won the crown 1991.

spend part of her first three years at Netflix identifying international series worth importing to the company’s U.S. service and finding U.S. shows which could work on Netflix outside of North America, such as Star Trek: Discovery. Sarandos may also be thinking Bajaria is the best person to scale up international content because of how quickly she and her former NBCUniversal colleague Brandon Riegg built the company’s unscripted business. The two joined the company in 2016 and mounted a development blitz, working to produce shows in all major reality-TV categories. Early hits developed while Bajaria was still working on unscripted included Queer Eye and Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. More recently, the division (run solo by Riegg, and reporting to Holland, since March 2019) has struck gold with Love Is Blind, The Circle, and Floor Is Lava. Before arriving at Netflix in 2016, Bajaria was very much entrenched in the broadcast TV business. After a brief stint hosting a weekly entertainment news show for a small Los Angeles TV station in the mid-1990s, she first made her mark as an exec developing TV movies at CBS in the late 1990s and early ’00s. (Your Buffering correspondent is old enough to remember meeting with Bajaria at her CBS Television City offices.) Bajaria kept the Eye’s TV-movie franchise going even after rival networks abandoned what was seen (and remains) a dead format for broadcast TV. She eventually left CBS for NBCUniversal, after a producer she once hired to make a miniseries — Robert Greenblatt (Elvis) — got a job running NBC and asked her to run the company’s production arm. At NBCU, Bajaria developed shows such as The Mindy Project and two future Netflix hits: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Master of None.