Netflix is releasing House of Cards, the first major television series to feature exclusively streaming service, forever changing television. The person in charge is none other than Ted Sarantos, the then content director of Netflix – today he has risen to the position of co-CEO – who at that moment took the step that transformed him into the most powerful man in Hollywood.
David Fincher – who has already directed films such as Se7en, Zodiac and The Social Network – began working on the American version of the British political drama House of Cards in 2011.
The director invited representatives from all major television networks to a meeting to promote his first television series. Among the executives who received an invitation was Ted Sarantos. But Netflix No. 2 – the company that started renting DVDs by mail – declined the invitation. Instead, he asked for a personal appointment with Fincher.
Sarantos, who has described himself as a “human algorithm”, had studied Netflix data to see how many subscribers were watching political dramas. And he had counted the fanatics of Kevin Spacey, who had already been nominated for the starring role in the House of Cards.
So, believing in the success of the series, he entered Fincher’s office in West Hollywood with a proposal that the director could not refuse: Netflix would commit from the beginning not only for one, but for two seasons of House of Cards . The rumored price was $ 100 million (Sarantos denied the information at the time, but refused to give the exact number).
The other networks asked to see the pilot of the series before making their offer. But Sarantos had no such demand from Fincher. And so he managed to “steal” the series that broke funds through the hands of major channels, such as HBO.
“There were 100 reasons not to work with Netflix. “We had to give them a great reason to work with Netflix,” explained the Greek-born manager.
And his strategy paid off. “When someone offers you exactly what you ask for, you have to be smart enough to say ‘yes,'” Fincher said.
When Sarantos revealed to him that Netflix was planning to release all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once – giving birth to what is now known as “binge watching” (the practice of watching one episode after another) , spending hours stuck on the screen), Fincher got excited.
“My reaction was ‘this sounds fantastic’. As television becomes more and more like literature, I would love to be able to lean the book on the nightstand whenever I want. “It seemed to me like a natural evolution of things”, the director would explain later.
What followed changed the map of the entertainment industry forever. The first season of House of Cards has been released in its entirety, breaking the decades-old practice of television leaving viewers waiting a week for the next episode of their favorite series.
The series was a huge success and brought streaming to the first category of showbiz, winning nine Emmy nominations. House of Cards continued for five more seasons, garnering a total of seven Emmy Awards and 56 nominations. The final season focused on the character wife embodied by Spacey, played by Robin Wright, following revelations of sexual harassment that ended the actor’s career.
This was followed by another big hit for Netflix, with Orange is the New Black, which premiered a few months later. The other streaming services were forced to follow Ted Sarando’s example, producing their own content. And in 2018, Icarus became the first Netflix production to win an Oscar.
With its subscriber base exploding during the pandemic (it gained at least 36 million new subscribers in 2020 and another 18.2 million in 2021), Netflix now has 222 million subscribers worldwide.
The Greek-born King of Hollywood
Ted Sarantos was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1964 and although he does not speak Greek, he has Greek roots, since his grandfather once left Samos behind him, to immigrate to America.
“You know, Sarantos is a very common adjective on the island and my grandfather decided to use it,” the Greek-American manager said in an interview, explaining the story behind his name.
The son of an electrician and a housewife, Sarantos grew up in a house where the television played all day as his mother tried to keep her five children away from her feet. His parents barely covered the monthly expenses and when the bills were left unpaid, their house was sometimes without electricity and sometimes without telephone. “But cable TV was the last thing that was cut,” he recalls.
Somehow, he found himself waking up every night watching episodes of classic American television comedies. In those years he dreamed of becoming a journalist and had taken over as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and later of his university. But he soon realized that he was not born for it.
He was found working in a video club, where he spent all day watching movies. At that time he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge about cinema, but also a unique ability to suggest to everyone exactly the movies that he will like. “Human algorithm” is the way journalists often describe it. “It was like going to film school,” he would say later.
In 2000 he transferred to Netflix. Reed Hastings had started the company to rent DVDs by mail, but the idea of online streaming had already been planted in his mind. When he described his vision to Sarantos, he must have sounded like crazy. After all, it was a time when the internet was still so slow that any thought of watching movies online seemed utopian. But Sarantos was convinced and took the step to become the strongest man in the global show business industry.
This, however, was something the Samians did not know when Sarantos attempted to explore the island of his ancestors. At one point, wanting to discover his roots, he followed the instructions given to him by his father: “You enter the port, turn left, look up at the hill. “There is a yellow house with goats in the yard.” But the sequel was not what he expected. “My children were excited to get to know their family. We knock on the door, but they do not speak English and I do not speak Greek. “So I try to explain to them who I am, when they finally close the door on us.”
He had to return to the hotel and ask the manager to write him a letter in Greek. “I gave it to them, and five minutes later we all ate and drank together,” he said in an interview.
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