Production Executive for Streaming Shows

Her family wanted her to have good opportunities to succeed as an adult, but they were hoping that she would remain strictly faithful to the customs of her Asian-Indian cultural heritage. Instead, she made her own choices and succeeded due to knowing the path she wanted to follow, learning the business, and earning the respect of her colleagues and supervisors. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND

BB was born in London to Indian parents, whose ancestors hailed from New Delhi. BB’s parents were married in East Africa, from where they migrated to England for her birth, so that she would have what they considered ‘a more desirable passport’. After living briefly in Zambia and then back in England, the parents moved to Los Angeles, where they started an eventually successful car washing company. 

But BB’s parents had left her in London, with her grandparents, to continue school while the parents settled into their new country and start-up business. Due to visa issues, BB didn’t reunite with her parents in L.A. until three years later. BB recalled: “I was seeing these people who were my parents but who I did not know because I hadn’t been around them for several years, and there were no Indians here (in L.A.).” 

CHILDHOOD

As a child, BB was living in a new country with a different language. (Editor – an old saying is that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language” – referring, amusingly, to the different accents used for the same words, though often the English based words used to describe the same situation are different; for example, in the U.S., workers are “fired” or “terminated” while in England, fired workers are “redundant”).

TV became BB’s window onto an unfamiliar culture. Each week, the family would gather to watch the television shows “Dallas” and “Dynasty”. BB recalled that within a couple of months, she had lost her British accent. 

BB’s parents liked to entertain, throwing parties playing Hindu music into the early morning. They tried – unsuccessfully – to prevent their daughter from becoming too ‘Americanized’ – they discouraged her from dating or even playing volleyball. “My dad said, ‘Those shorts are too short!” When she was in high school, BB baffled her elders with the announcement that she wanted to work in entertainment. “Even later, when I was on the cover of Forbes magazine (focusing on stories related to the world of business), one of my Indian aunties said: “We’re proud of you, BB but it’s so surprising.”

EDUCATION

Following high school graduation, BB enrolled in a well-known California university. While there, BB signed up for “Miss India California” a pageant for women of Indian descent, at the suggestion of a family friend. For the talent portion of the competition, she learned a dance from the classic Bollywood film “Guide.” (“Bollywood” is the informal name of the Indian national movie industry, producing movies in native Indian language, often featuring a tragic, romantic ending). At first, she had “two left feet” (a common description of an awkward, unathletic person) but she improved her dance moves sufficiently to not detract from the points awarded by the pageant judges in other categories, winning the title, followed by winning “Miss India USA” and finally, “Miss India Universe.” 

All of these pageants required time away from BB’s university studies but eventually she transferred to another state university, from which she graduated. 

CAREER BEGINS ALONG A PATH SHE CHOOSES RATHER THAN AS FIRST OFFERED

“I have this theory that I won because I didn’t see it as a step in my career. I didn’t want to be an actress. I didn’t need it.” After her victory, a Bollywood studio offered her an acting contract, but she declined, instead purchasing a copy of the “Hollywood Creative Directory” and sent a slew of cover letters to studios, inquiring about entry-level jobs. This led to two interviews. One, at TriStar Pictures, yielded nothing. During the other, at CBS, she learned that Joan Yee, an executive in the movies and miniseries department, had been looking for a new assistant. BB persuaded Yee to take her on for a month-long trial and ended up staying in the role for almost two years. 

The movies-and-miniseries department where BB was first employed within the movie industry, churned out dozens of programs a year, including schmaltzy epics, true-crime dramatizations and the long-running “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Owing to the ‘female-skewing’ audiences for such fare, it was one of the few corners of network television in which women executives dominated. Said BB, “It was so rare to work for a woman, let alone a woman of color” (Yee was born in Hong Kong.). 

CAREER MOVES DON’T ALWAYS WORK WELL BUT ARE OFTEN WORTH THE RISK

Another of BB’s supervisors recalled BB as “strategic and savvy and very charismatic.” After a few years, BB accepted a job offer at Warner Bros. Studios, but she ended up back at CBS, two months later, after a departing executive recommended that she take his place. She was 27 years old. The superior told BB “I don’t think anybody ever got promoted out of the assistant pool before.”

BB found her first major success with a Joan of Arc miniseries which was made on a tight schedule, over one winter, and was nominated for thirteen Emmys. Within a few more years, she was promoted to run the movies-and-miniseries department. Many people who have worked with BB describe her uncommon decisiveness. Creative decision-making can be agonizing, especially when millions of dollars are on the line. BB does not overthink. A colleague in movies and miniseries said, “The thing is, she’s not an intellectual. She’s smart. There’s a difference. She’s bold and that’s what it takes. I don’t have that gene and that’s why my career only went so far. You need to be able to say yes and keep forging ahead.”

Success in movie productions led to peer recognition. “The men around me kept saying ‘Your job is so great” she recalled. But she saw that even her department’s biggest programs had trouble competing with other network’s series and that young cable companies were eager for new original programming. So, she persuaded the president and CEO of CBS to let her launch an in-house cable studio, a production hub operating under the umbrella of CBS but able to license to other outlets. The company didn’t offer much support, and most of her projects languished in development, but the job led to an offer to revive the in-house studio at NBC, under the name Universal Television, whose President said: “I knew she was immensely capable of (producing) volume. She also had this way of gaining others’ approval, where people were drawn to her.” 

CHALLENGE – FINDING YOURSELF OUTSIDE A COMPANY’S REORGANIZATION DUE TO NO FAULT OF YOUR OWN

BB said that her knack for selling projects to other companies may ultimately have worked against her at Universal. One day, the President of Universal called BB into his office and informed her that he was letting her go. As the President explained: “I was just moving big pieces around within the company. She had sort of already reached the top of (her department) within the company.” 

BB found the firing humiliating. “It’s this reckoning with your identity” she said. “I came up from a family of car washes and Universal was my car wash. I hired everybody there, I created the culture. But one executive she knew told her to see the dismissal as a rite of passage. “He said ‘You’re actually somebody in this business because you got fired.” 

SUCCESS WITHIN ONE COMPANY MAY BE NOTICED BY COMPETITORS

BB’s success within the industry had indeed been noticed by others, including an executive with Netflix, who, the week after she was fired, invited her to a meeting. BB’s experience in recognizing which shows would likely appeal to which audiences and then promoting them through production, sometimes contrary to concerns about possible failure, were the features of her career which appealed to Netflix, wanting to expand its business in the face of new competition.

BB’s job at Netflix isn’t to decide which shows get made. Instead, she works with her company’s production teams in many different countries, challenging and motivating them to analyze what shows will fit best within their local cultures and perhaps be transferrable to other world cultures. Said BB, “We truly believe that great storytelling can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere.” 

LOYALTY TO CO-WORKERS AND COURAGE TO SUPPORT THEM LEADS TO CAREER SATISFACTION

The most successful movie producers reporting to BB said that she backed their vision, even if she wasn’t personally interested in the materials. One director recalled that when he approached BB with an idea for a miniseries adaptation of a notoriously dense, thousand-page novel, she told him, “I’ve never read the book, and I’ll tell you right now I’m not going to read the book. But if this is the thing you’re passionate about then let’s figure out how to do it. 

SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES ARE MINDFUL OF THE FINANCIAL IMPACT OF DECISIONS, BOTH IN THE SHORT AND LONG RANGE

While BB is loyal to certain show creators, she is very deferential to the viewers of her company’s shows. She seemed perplexed that many critics had been disgusted by a slog of violence in a bio-pic and after reading many scathing reviews, she said “Are they just trying to be contrary? People have very different tastes and I have no disdain for whatever those tastes are. What is quality? What is good versus not? That’s all subjective. I just want to super-serve the audience. If they don’t want to see gore, they can turn it off but at least they’ll have the opportunity to make and follow their own judgment.”

BB advises her content teams to “tune out the noise of the critics and the time pressures and focus instead on what they could control. What we can do is always be audience-centric. Who is this show for? If you like this show, then we’re going to give you more of what you like. If you do that, people are gonna watch the shows and all those things will help the financial results for the company.”

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This career story is based on an article by Rachel Syme published in “The New Yorker” magazine 1/16/23.