Memo to Peter Rice

To: Peter Rice, Netflix Programming Honcho, Inbound
From: Richard Rushfield, Gadfly, Know-It-All
Re: Saving the World

Oct. 20, 2026

Peter.

First, let’s bow our heads for the thousands of journalists who have devoted the past decade to writing “What’s Next for Peter Rice?” articles. An entire branch of journalism, killed in one press release.

And congratulations on the new job as Netflix content boss. You gave up a comfortable, by all accounts, very happy life away from the spotlight to take on the most impossible, unforgiving job in the world, but when the call of history comes, we do our duty.

Netflix, in its time, has done incredible things: produced shows and films that will be treasured and remembered, run circles around the old studios and networks — jumping into areas they had abandoned and turning them into monster hits. The company’s audacity and daring lit a fire under the sleepy system, and that moxie turned a little DVD-by-mail catalog service into the planet’s dominant entertainment producer — at times churning out more than all the traditional studios combined.

But that’s old news. Bureaucratic sclerosis is a real thing in business as well as government. Over time, others imitate your successes, making them less distinctive, and internal habits, systems and fiefdoms weigh you down and rob you of the agility that made you great in the first place.

Netflix still does plenty of great work among its vast output — as anyone who has watched East of Eden or seen La Bola Negra or Brad Bird’s new animated Ray Gunn can confirm. But there’s no denying the company has lost the spring in its step — to say nothing of the more than 40 percent drop in the stock price since last year.

To some extent, this comes down to the impossible problem that the mature, grown-up Netflix faces, the problem that your predecessors — many of them enormously talented — tried to stare down. How do you produce vast streams of entertainment — a firehose so immense and relentless it brought the dreaded c-word (“content”) to the forefront of the Hollywood lexicon — while maintaining something resembling traditional standards of quality?

I’m sure you’re already finding that these difficult problems have no simple button to push to make everything okay. And I’m sure that since your ascension was announced, you’ve received enough advice-filled messages to print and paper the walls of your new office, along with the floor and ceiling, while you’re at it.

But you can throw them all away.

Your faithful columnist is here to give you the advice of all advice.

Let’s start by killing one of Netflix’s most sacred traditions. And bringing back one of Hollywood’s most despised.

And the good news? You may be the only person in Hollywood who can get away with it.