How Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria Was Born to Disrupt the Status Quo
It was almost midnight on Emmy Awards Sunday. The crowd at the Netflix after-party in Hollywood was thinning fast. Those who were left on that September evening were called to action by the DJ with a “last dance” alert — a Netflix tradition that brought all of the streamers’ remaining staffers to the dance floor for a few final tunes.
As Salt-N-Pepa urged them to “push it,” Bela Bajaria, 53, cut quite a figure, moving around the space in a brightly colored flowing skirt and an off-the-shoulder sheer black blouse.
Bajaria, the chief content officer for the streaming platform that has set the standard for what TV has become in the 21st century, danced in a group that included Netflix programming executives Peter Friedlander and Jinny Howe and communications chief Emily Feingold. Most top executives steer clear of the dance floor at company parties, but Bajaria was the picture of happiness as she danced with easy fluidity.
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“Sweet dreams are made of this,” Annie Lennox sang while Team Bela exulted one last time in their Emmy wins for “Baby Reindeer,” “The Crown,” “Ripley” and other shows. “Who am I to disagree?”
Not Bajaria. She knows well how much good fortune has come her way. The creative executive who made her mark at CBS and Universal Television before joining Netflix in 2016 is the embodiment of her female Indian ancestors’ wildest dreams.
Today, Bajaria ranks high among the world’s most influential media executives. She oversees a content budget larger than the gross domestic product of Greenland, Barbados and the U.S. Virgin Islands combined ($17 billion for 2024). She sits atop a pyramid of hundreds of programming executives in 27 countries who are tasked with greenlighting series and movies in 50 languages. Bajaria’s range of experience in programming and production has led her to a C-suite role at Netflix with unprecedented global scope and financial resources to commission movies and TV shows. No content platform has ever served up the volume of programs in a multitude of languages that Netflix has in recent years. So Bajaria is in uncharted waters, and she’s loving it.
“Opening the non-English local country offices around the world has been such an amazing opportunity,” she says. It has forced her to use all the creative muscles she’s built up in roles as a program buyer, seller and producer.
“What’s been fun is that Netflix culture moves really quickly,” she says. “It’s very nimble, and it takes a lot of agility, which I love. No other company has tried to program with this ambition right across this many tastes, languages, cultures and genres. And to be able to champion storytellers from all of these other countries in their own voices and give access to those stories on a service globally is incredible.”
Bajaria’s eagerness to learn and zeal for the business of creating TV shows, with all of its unpredictability, was evident from her early days at CBS.
“She’s unbelievably effective as a creative executive and as a manager,” says Nancy Tellem, the former president of CBS Entertainment Group. Tellem notes that Bajaria’s colleagues were impressed by her intellectual curiosity and her drive to be innovative in whatever she tackled.
“When you’re heading movies and miniseries — that could have been turned into a pretty formulaic development process. She never did,” Tellem says. “She was always curious, always wanted to grow the department, always wanted to push her shows beyond what would have been expected.”
Reflecting on the arc of her career, Bajaria can’t help pointing out how much change has occurred just in her own family since her great-grandmothers were forced into marriage at ages 13 and 14. Bajaria is the mother of three — Rami, 23, Sofia, 21, and Enzo, 17 — with her husband, screenwriter Doug Prochilo.
“I say it to my girls all the time: They’re the first generation in our family to grow up with real choice about what they want to do for their career, and who they want to marry — they have that,” Bajaria says.
The Americanization of London-born Bajaria began at age nine, when her family relocated to Torrance, Calif., after living for a few years in Zambia. At the time that Bajaria’s family emigrated, there were large Indian communities established in New Jersey and New York, but her father wanted a warm climate after London. That decision ensured that Bajaria would come of age in the crucible of 1980s pop culture while her family built up a string of car-wash businesses.
Bajaria used TV as an anthropologist would to decipher her new world. She loved her reruns of “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gomer Pyle” during the day and the glitz of “Dallas” and “Dynasty” and “Magnum, P.I.” at night.
She loved TV so much that, from her family’s living room, she set her sights on a career in entertainment. Before she understood what that meant, she felt the force that entertainment exerted. She recognized that TV shows and movies were the one thing that everyone talked about at school the next day. “I watched a lot of film and TV, and even though I didn’t see myself represented on-screen, I was always struck that all of us from different backgrounds watched the same show. We’d all go to school, we’d all talk about it and it connected people,” Bajaria says. “Because growing up as a young Indian girl in Los Angeles was isolating, right? So there was something about that, where I always understood that entertainment was really powerful.”
The catalyst for everything she’s achieved starts with Bajaria’s parents’ determination to give their children more opportunities than they would have had in their native India. Bajaria’s extended family worked round the clock to make their car-wash operations a success. It was an all-hands process that helped give Bajaria her drive and her understanding of basic business. “That family business was very instrumental in the way that I choose to manage,” she says.
Her family’s support gave Bajaria the confidence to pursue her dream in entertainment. Hard work allowed Bajaria’s father to move his family from Torrance to the tonier Palos Verdes area by the time Bajaria was in high school. “His thing was ‘You’re smarter than you think you are. You’re better than you think you are. The ceiling is way higher than you think it is,’” she says. “And to be honest, it sounds very warm and fuzzy — and it was — but it was also said with expectation — like, there’s nothing worse or sadder than wasted potential, right? So it was a stern, strong, rah-rah speech.”
After graduating from California State University at Long Beach, Bajaria worked briefly for a nonprofit that raised money to help children in India. In her spare time, she wrote letters to every network, studio and production company that she could find in the Hollywood Creative Directory. Only a few wrote back. One of them was CBS. She got her foot in the door as an assistant in their TV movies division in 1996. Six years later, she was a senior VP running the department.
“I was so lucky that my parents were risk-takers who came to America,” she says. She jokes that for her generation of Indian Americans, “you could be a doctor, or a doctor, or a doctor — any kind of doctor. And my path was very different.”
Once she got her first job at CBS, Bajaria quickly fell in love with the work of being a programming executive: taking pitches, reading scripts, watching cuts. “A writer comes in,” she says, “and they pitch something. And there’s something special about that voice — the authenticity, something that feels bold or exciting — and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so excited for people to see this!’ That’s always been the best part for me.”
As an Indian woman, Bajaria was unique among TV execs in the 1990s and early 2000s. She proudly embraced her roots by wearing colorful saris to awards shows and industry events, while being a mother to three very American kids. She never thought of herself as a trailblazer for inclusion in entertainment until those around her pointed out how rare it was to find people of South Asian descent in senior decision-making roles.
The passage of time and the upward trajectory of her career means more and more Indian people reach out to her for advice and support. “It’s a very important part of my life. I take a lot of care and thoughtfulness to meet with people when I can or give advice when I can,” she says.
Bajaria has long been respected in the industry as someone who makes no apologies about her ambition. Early on, she set her sights on running a big television studio. That came to fruition in June 2011 when she was recruited by NBCUniversal from CBS to rebuild the Universal Television production studio as its president.
“At CBS, I was very intentional with myself that I was going to read everything, I was going to watch everything, I was going to listen, I was going to learn,” she says. She knew from her experience in the family business that understanding how all the parts of the operation function and fit together is crucial for success. Even now, she thinks of her job as running “my studio car wash.”
The car-wash business is cutthroat and competitive, and so is the business of entertaining the world. Bajaria’s division is the single biggest engine that can pump up Netflix’s subscriber levels and profits — or not.
“I want our shows to resonate with people. That’s what I’m always looking for. Did people love it? Did they stay and watch?” she asks. “Can we make something that you’ll love so much, you’ll talk about it and tell your friends. That’s really the thing.”
Charity Spotlight: Room to Read
When girls have access to education, anything is possible. Bela Bajaria believes deeply in the power of literacy to effect change around the world. That’s why the Netflix leader is a strong supporter of the global nonprofit Room to Read, led by CEO Geetha Murali.
The San Francisco-based organization operates programs in 24 countries to help girls learn to read and complete secondary school in parts of the world where women are often denied such opportunities. Bajaria was drawn to Room to Read’s focus on combating gender inequality by extending educational opportunities to women.
“It’s important to me that we give these young girls a chance to succeed and really have choice in what they do as they get older,” Bajaria says.
Education, in Bajaria’s view, is the antidote to child marriage. Bajaria and her daughter Rami have seen the results firsthand through their visits to Room to Read facilities in Cambodia and Tanzania. “It was really extraordinary to spend the day in the girls’ education program doing life skills classes. They teach agency and being empowered and understanding how to advocate for yourself,” Bajaria says.
The need is immense. Some 250 million children around the world have no school experience, and two-thirds of the world’s adults who can’t read are women, according to Room to Read.
Bajaria has been particularly impressed with the organization’s program that pairs girls with adult mentors for as long as seven years to ensure they develop vital skills and make it through high school or equivalent instructional programs.
“They’re part social worker, part big sister, part therapist,” Bajaria says. “I’ve seen up close and personal the work that they’ve done and the impact it’s had on young women. And that’s why Room to Read is important to me.”
