to help its managers strengthen their bonds with Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and Asian American candidates.
“What my team tries to do is to really give people a lens, right? Because inclusion can’t be in the room every moment and every day,” says Myers. Never Have I Ever,Da 5Bloods,Selena: The SeriesEach builds on a foundation laid by one of Netflix’s earliest original series,demonstrated that shows with a diverse cast could attract wide audiences in the U.S. and globally.
As the streaming wars heated up, Netflix locked up two of the most successful Black showrunners in television with nine-figure overall deals—s Kenya Barris, who sources say plans to continue work on a documentary film about civil rights attorney Ben Crump for Netflix even as he prepares to launch a studio in partnership with ViacomCBS.
Netflix has been focused on cleaning its own house, whether it be working to increase the number of female engineers working in the product team or do a better job overall of recruiting Latinx candidates, who now account for a mere 5% of its leadership—a deficit that Myers calls “abysmal”—even before the brutal killing of George Floyd last spring forced the entertainment industry to examine its distorted portrayals of Black Americans, an event Hastings called “a tipping point in white...