When you come home after a long day, curl up on the couch with a warm cup of hot chocolate, and open Netflix to decide what to watch, the moment feels effortless. A Korean thriller appears alongside a glossy period drama, a Spanish crime series, next to an Indian police procedural, and something new seems to have arrived overnight. Few viewers pause to ask who decides that these stories exist, or why they are presented as equally worth their time.
Behind that seemingly infinite menu is a single, powerful editorial intelligence. Much of what the world watches on Netflix is shaped by Bela Bajaria, an Indian-origin woman who today serves as the giant streaming platform’s Chief Content Officer.
From Los Angeles, she oversees a content operation that spans more than 50 languages, hundreds of creative executives across 27 countries, and an annual budget of roughly $17 billion.
Bajaria’s authority does not come from celebrity or spectacle. It comes from systems, judgement, and an unusually clear thesis about storytelling in a globalised world, that audiences do not need their cultures simplified to connect with them. They need stories confident enough to remain rooted where they come from.
Bajaria’s childhood
Born in London to Gujarati Indian parents, Bajaria spent her early childhood moving between continents. Immigration complications meant prolonged family separations. She lived for a time in Zambia with her grandparents while her parents worked toward legal residency in the United States. By the time she joined them in Los Angeles at the age of eight, she had already internalised the instability of migration.
Economic necessity, not aspiration, drove these relocations. Her father ran small businesses, including a car wash, where Bajaria helped as a child. Cultural assimilation was neither immediate nor comfortable. “When I was growing up, there was a lot of racism against Indian people, definitely in London,” she told British Vogue.
Television became her first sustained exposure to American life. Sitcoms offered instruction as much as entertainment, teaching cadence, humour and social norms. More subtly, they revealed television’s capacity to integrate outsiders, not by erasing difference, but by offering familiarity. The lesson stayed with her, audiences do not need cultural translation, they need emotional clarity.
Confidence publicly earned
Before entering television professionally, Bajaria took a detour that would later complicate assumptions about her seriousness. Encouraged by a friend, she entered beauty pageants after high school, eventually winning Miss India USA and Miss India Worldwide in 1991. “I thought it would be fun to discover the India culture on my own terms, through my own identity,” she told Variety in 2016.
The experience, she has said, was less about spectacle than solidarity. Meeting Indian women from across the world helped her articulate an identity that could hold contradiction, tradition and autonomy, visibility and ambition. According to IMDb, the pageant title brought her industry exposure, but her interest remained firmly behind the camera.
Learning power the long way around
Bajaria graduated from California State University, Long Beach, in 1995 with a degree in communications and joined CBS as an assistant in the movies-and-miniseries department. It was a low-ranking role with little formal authority, but she used it as a strategic vantage point.
She read every script, studied executive notes, and paid close attention to how decisions were justified. “Everyone was my mentor, but they just didn’t know it,” she told Forbes. At 26, a departing senior executive recommended her as his replacement. “My confidence comes from experience,” she later told British Vogue. “I did the work. Always. I read every script of my boss’s and everybody else’s.”
She spent 15 years at CBS, rising steadily and eventually running the network’s in-house cable studio. Being underestimated became an advantage. “I had already pushed a lot of boundaries at home or in the community,” she said to CBS. “Showbiz can be tough, but Indian aunties are way harder to please.”
Bajaria’s appointment as President of Universal Television marked a historical milestone, the first woman of colour to run a major US television studio. The weight of the role was matched by operational pressure.
At Universal, she pursued a strategy that prioritised creative conviction over internal politics. When NBC passed on certain projects, Bajaria produced them anyway and sold them elsewhere. The Mindy Project, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Master of None and the Chicago franchise validated her instincts creatively.
In June 2016, Bajaria was fired.
She described the moment to CNBC as a “big public failure.” The aftermath was emotionally disorienting. “All those amazing shows, all these great relationships I built; I treated people so fairly. We had a lot of success, it meant nothing,” she recalled thinking.
Over time, the experience recalibrated her relationship with risk. “I’m not scared of getting fired. It’s very liberating, actually,” she told CNBC. “I’m so grateful that it happened.”
How did Netflix happen to her?
Ted Sarandos recruited Bajaria to Netflix in 2016, at a moment when the platform was expanding rapidly but had yet to fully define its global identity. Initially overseeing unscripted programming and licensing, she soon took charge of international content, an area treated until then as market diversification rather than strategic core.
Bajaria reversed that hierarchy. Instead of adapting local stories for global palatability, Netflix empowered regional executives with decision making autonomy. Cultural specificity became an asset, not a liability.
The results were immediate and disruptive. La Casa de Papel, Squid Game, Lupin and Delhi Crime succeeded globally without Western mediation. Netflix demonstrated that audiences would follow stories grounded deeply in local realities, provided they were emotionally legible.
India became a proving ground. Bajaria resisted treating it as a single market, investing instead across languages, age groups and genres. Series such as Sacred Games, Mismatched, Class and Delhi Crime showed this segmented approach. By the mid-2020s, Indian titles contributed a lot to Netflix’s global viewing metrics, altering distribution economics across the industry.
Consolidation of power
In January 2023, Bajaria was appointed Netflix’s sole Chief Content Officer, which claimed authority over all scripted, unscripted, film, international and live programming. Her remit expanded to include live sports and events, with Netflix securing high-profile deals involving the NFL, WWE and global boxing.
These moves were less about rights acquisition than behavioural change, keeping audiences on the platform across formats. Yet Bajaria has consistently framed storytelling, not spectacle, as the platform’s centre of gravity.
“Creativity is not dead,” she said at Netflix’s Next on Netflix event. “Not on Netflix, and not for the creators we work with.”
Under Bajaria’s leadership, Netflix has dominated awards seasons. According to Forbes, Beef earned eight Emmys in 2024. Netflix led all studios in Academy Award nominations and secured 107 Emmy nominations across 35 productions.
The cultural spillover has been measurable. Bridgerton boosted tourism and economic activity in the UK, Emily in Paris influenced French tourism, and The Queen’s Gambit sparked renewed global interest in chess.
“I want our shows to resonate with people,” Bajaria told Variety. “Did people love it? Did they stay and watch? Can we make something that you’ll love so much, you’ll talk about it and tell your friends.”
Bajaria serves on the boards of The Paley Center and community health organisations in Los Angeles. In 2024, she joined The Coca-Cola Company’s Board of Directors. She has been recognised by TIME, Forbes and Fortune as one of the most influential executives in the world. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, writer-producer Doug Prochilo, and their three children. According to Mabumbe, her net worth is close to $1.2 billion ( November 17, 2025)
Claiming the power in the world of content chaos
Bajaria does not appear on screen, but her decisions shape what appears on screens everywhere. Her career charts the evolution of entertainment from national industries to global platforms and the corresponding shift in who holds creative power.
In an industry long driven by sameness disguised as scale, Bajaria built a different proposition, that audiences are not overwhelmed by difference, but drawn to it.
