PROFILES: EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE

The executive leading Netflixs quest for worldwide domination.

- RACHEL SYME

Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s global head of television, follows a similar routine whether she’s visiting Mum bai or Berlin or Seoul or Stockholm or any of the company’s twenty-six foreign outposts. A black car brings her from the airport to a luxury hotel, perhaps the Four Seasons. She checks in and furiously answers e-mails from Los Angeles until it’s time for a breakfast or a dinner or a midday meal with executives and creators. She wears her favorite “travel blazer,” a designer jacket bejeweled on the breast pocket with the words “Art is truth.” And, though she often stays “in country” for only a day or two at a time, she likes to schedule a “slate meeting” so that the local development team can fill her in on upcoming programs. On an afternoon not long ago, she was kicking off one such meeting at the company’s Latin American headquarters, inside one of the tallest skyscrapers in Mexico City.

“Next time, I’ll get to stay for a week, so I won’t have to eat twenty-four tacos in twenty-four hours, like last time,” she said to the room of assembled staff members.

Bajaria told me that the ideal Netflix show is what one of her V.P.s, Jinny Howe, calls a “gourmet cheeseburger,” offering something “premium and commercial at the same time.” She praised the Latin American group for its recent track record of making slick telenovelas that draw large audiences outside Spanish-speaking regions.