Chelsea Handler doesn’t care what you think.
When Germany won the World Cup in 2014, Chuy Bravo, her sidekick on the talk show she hosted on E!, dressed up as Adolf Hitler. When 12 Years A Slave won an Academy Award, Handler tweeted people could “Go to Africa” or buy her latest book, which is about Africa. This year, she joked on a new TV show that she doesn’t trust the Portuguese.
Handler is everything great and terrifying about America. She says what she wants. She does what she wants. She goes where she wants. And she doesn’t worry.
“No,” she tells me in her assistant’s office on the Sony Pictures Studio lot in Los Angeles. She’s wearing a men’s large t-shirt with a logo of a bearded man. She doesn’t know where its from. I ask: Doesn’t she worry offending people will eventually hurt her? Or the networks that carry her shows?
“I’m sure there are plenty of people to worry about that,” Handler says. “I’m not one of them.”
You know who does care what you think of Chelsea Handler? Netflix. Earlier this year, the company announced that it now streams shows, films, and documentaries in 190 countries around the world—so pretty much everywhere besides China. Add to the list of programming Chelsea, an experiment in late-night talk shows hosted by Handler. She’s not exactly the obvious choice.
Building the infrastructure for Chelsea will change the way Netflix reaches people all around the world.
That’s because for Netflix, growing an international audience is the key to its business. That means being fast, nimble, and multilingual. And Handler is so American.
So is the concept of the show. Handler will interview celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow, and wonkier experts like Jon Favreau (the presidential speechwriter, not the movie director) in front of a live studio audience. She’ll travel to locationss like Tokyo, Mexico City, and Florida to chat with regular people (and kids too) about current events and issues. She’ll be serious, she’ll be funny, she’ll be real. She’ll have new episodes on Netflix available every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for the rest of the year.
At 12:01 this morning, the first episode of Chelsea went live. The show, filmed on Monday, made its way to pretty much everyone, pretty much everywhere—20 languages, 50 video formats—in less than 36 hours. Whether it succeeds will probably be a secret forever, since Netflix has never revealed viewership numbers. So maybe the company doesn’t actually care what you think of Chelsea Handler. The network cares about infrastructure. Because putting out her show this way—no matter what happens to the show itself—will change the way Netflix reaches people around the world.
Netflix wasn’t always in the market for a talk show. “I hit on them until they committed,” Handler says.
In 2014, Handler approached Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, at a post-Oscar’s party. “She asked, ‘Are you the Netflix guy?’” Sarandos says. Handler was nearing the end of her Chelsea Lately contract with E!, and looking for something new. Netflix got interested too. “The late night show that didn’t have to be late night became really intriguing for us,” Sarandos says.
A stand-up comedy special and a four-part docuseries Chelsea Does served as a kind of test run for what ultimately would become Chelsea. Did they do well? Who knows. It’s Netflix. But wanting a talk show—arguably the flagship of any network since the days of Johnny Carson and David Letterman—is not the same thing as wanting Chelsea Handler. “What drew us to Chelsea in the first place is that she’s extraordinarily curious and smart,” says Lisa Nishimura, Netflix’s vice president of original documentaries and comedy, who has worked closely with the production team on the show. “She’s unique in the late night space in the sense that she’s not afraid to have an opinion.”
Sarandos says the show will live somewhere between the more vulgar, interview-style of Handler’s old talk show and the more serious, documentary-style of Chelsea Does. “It’s like a 2.0 version of me,” Handler says. She plans to approach the people and things that interest her. “The Electoral College, super delegates, the moon, space,” Handler says. “All the shit we’re supposed to know that I don’t fucking know—and that people pretend to know.”
So Handler is brash, sometimes offensive, talking about very American stuff—on a show designed to play internationally. But Netflix executives say they aren’t worried. “I wouldn’t want to give up anything about Chelsea’s voice to be global,” Sarandos says. “ I always think it’s funny when people hire somebody, and then they get angry for doing what you hired them for.”
Before Chelsea, Handler developed a four-part docuseries for Netflix called Chelsea Does. Saeed Adyani/Netflix
Chelsea’s production team knows that story choice will be one challenge. “When we think about how to phrase our humor and our look at America, we are cognizant that the world—we hope—is watching,” says Bill Wolff, the executive producer of Chelsea and a former executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. Like, how do you make the US Electoral College interesting to someone from Japan? (“You can’t cater,” Handler says.)
No one thinks it’ll be easy. When Johnny Carson tried to take the Tonight Show to the UK, the effort was a complete flop. The Brits didn’t respond to his tongue-in-cheek humor. “What they love in France, what plays in Romania, what works in South Africa—there are all kind of weird tastes that different markets exhibit,” says Jennifer Holt, a film and media studies professor at UC Santa Barbara. A lot has changed since Carson tried to go overseas in the 1980s (namely, the Internet), but the world is still far bigger and broader than the US.
So how do you make sure Handler’s bawdy humor translates? Well, first you translate it. The company tested 5,000 people, tasking them with translating clips from Netflix shows like Orange Is the New Black and Handler’s stand-up special Uganda Be Kidding Me Live to ensure they could handle Handler’s jokes, English idioms, and cultural jargon. It was important to Netflix that the translators would not soften her language, says Tracy Wright, Netflix’s director of content operations, who leads the translation teams. “That they’re not going to say, ‘Darn,’ instead of whatever word she actually said.”
Saeed Adyani/Netflix
When the first episode of Chelsea wrapped in the late afternoon on Monday, Netflix’s team of 200 translators was already hard at work. Voice recognition software generated a quick-and-dirty English transcript of the half-hour show that an editor then cleaned up, noting idioms and current events that translators should know. Teams of three to six translators then translated that transcript to their target languages. A technical team then polished those and input them into Netflix’s system, so the subtitles are timed with Handler’s speech. The whole process should take about 12 hours, Wright says. Then they’ll do it all over again the next day. (For perspective, she says, a feature film could take a Netflix team around a week.)
So far, Wright says, translators haven’t really had questions on Trumpisms or vulgar words. It’s more like, “How do we think about translating Vicodin in Spanish?”
Then comes an even more invisible part. Netflix encodes any given movie or TV episode into more than 50 different formats, suited to watch on any device from an early-generation phones to a new 4K TV. A few years ago, it took around three days to encode all these different formats for a 30-minute show. Since then, the encoding process has taken just a few hours.
For each episode of Chelsea, the encoding team has 15 minutes. So the team responsible for all that encoding technology cleaned up the system’s bottlenecks, took out extra steps that served as backstops, and maximized their computing power. It was good for the show, but of course all those improvements mean that the company can now encode other videos more quickly as well.
Watching the show still won’t be exactly the same as bingeing House of Cards. Chelsea won’t be available in whole seasons at the same time. And, with new episodes streaming every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Chelsea won’t feel like a typical daily talk show, either.
Eddy Chen/Netflix
So Netflix’s product team had to figure out how to best display Chelsea episodes. New episodes are labeled “New;” older ones have dates. But, the episodes themselves won’t be numbered. “The numbers in the context of a talk show imply there’s a right way to watch it,” says Jennifer Nieva, the company’s director of product innovation. “But there is no right way to watch Chelsea.”
It’s also not yet clear to Netflix how you’ll watch the show: Will you binge? Watch episodes nightly? Watch three at a time? “There’s a challenge to being on Netflix, it’s not the nightly news,” Wolff says. “Given that, you have to pick topics that are timely, but also timeless.”
‘There’s a challenge to being on Netflix, it’s not the nightly news.’
When you binge a Netflix show, you probably let the service play episode after episode without choosing what comes next. If there’s no right way to watch it, then what does Netflix play next? With Chelsea, instead of playing the “first” episode first, Netflix will play you the most recent ones, then go backwards in date order. But if you want to start from the beginning and work your way forward, it’ll do that, too.
It’s a work in progress, Nieva says. Netflix, after all, will be watching how people everywhere choose to watch, and adapting the experience as it sees fit.
And since more and more people do watch late-night shows via clips the next day at work, Netflix has built tools for that, too. The company will be able to share links to specific moments in an episode on Netflix itself. If you’re a member, it will play seamlessly.
And, if you aren’t? You’ll be encouraged to sign up. “We want to compel people to enjoy this show on Netflix,” Nieva says. After all, Netflix’s business isn’t built on ads playing before a clip of Jimmy Fallon. Netflix wants subscribers.
All this technology is about much more than Chelsea Handler or late-night talk shows. Earlier this week, Netflix announced its first reality show, Ultimate Beastmaster. (Sadly, it’s not based on the classic 1982 film.)
The company already produces films, documentaries, kids shows, and around 30 seasons of scripted television a year. “But we’re gearing towards a day where that could be 300,” Sarandos says. “We might get to a place where we’re releasing a new season of a new show daily.” But, to get there, the technology and infrastructure has to be in place. That’s what Chelsea is for.
‘We might get to a place where we’re releasing a new season of a new show daily.’ Ted Sarandos
It’s also another step towards becoming global TV. Netflix has everything from Orange Is The New Black to Fuller House to Dreamworks Animation TV series to a Chelsea Handler talk show to Beasts of No Nation to cooking documentaries. “It really feels like creating everything you’re getting when you turn on your television,” says Richard Greenfield, a longtime media analyst for BTIG Capital.
In that respect, a talk show makes a lot of sense. The genre is a reliable draw for comedy-hungry audiences. Sure, Chelsea may be eschewing the late night tropes—no sidekick, no live band, no announcer, no established format—to fulfill Handler’s vision of her dream show. But, to go beyond its 81.5 million subscribers worldwide, Netflix is copying the TV model; it needs to have something for everyone.
It also needs to give you a reason not to cancel the service, Greenfield says. A talk show is a cost effective way of potentially being in people’s homes worldwide three days a week.
Handler tackles education with guests like the US secretary of education on her first show. Patrick Wymore/Netflix
And Netflix’s reach will, in effect, open opportunities not only for its business, but, its executives say, for the stories its shows want to tell too. “Netflix has people everywhere working for Netflix,” Wolff says. “It knows about really great hosts in England, really great people in Brazil.” Wolff is hoping to have “international correspondents” that Netflix knows become a part of the show to share what’s happening in, say, Rio de Janeiro during the Olympics.
Chelsea is then ultimately the chance to test out how all of this works—the translating, the encoding, the humor, the globe-trotting, the disrupting—for a rapidly approaching future. By marrying its tech culture with its nose for entertainment, Netflix is hoping that it can not only become bingeworthy TV, but that it can be the place people go to every day, no matter where they are, to find that thing that they want to watch.
But, first, the service will have to see how the world responds to Chelsea. “As long as it’s getting an audience as it relates to the cost of it,” Sarandos says. “And it’s getting into the zeitgeist and people are talking about the show. Then that’s a big win.”
“Who knows in Thailand what they’re going to think of me?” Handler says. “But I want people to feel like they’re coming in on a conversation.” So she kind of cares what people think. And Netflix cares even more.
