Why Netflix Is Binging On “Chelsea”

“This place is so huge!” says Chelsea Handler, nearly breaking into a Mary Tyler Moore–like twirl within an empty soundstage on the Sony lot.

“There’s a lot room to maneuver!” In a number of weeks, carpenters will begin development on the set of her upcoming Netflix discuss convey, scheduled to start streaming in one hundred ninety nations on may 11. however for now, on a heat February afternoon in Culver city, as Handler takes in the sixteen,000-sq.-foot house for the primary time, all she has is her creativeness.

“I’ve never actually been in here before,” she says. “I’ve simplest seen where the golf green room and the guest rooms are going to be. And”—she pauses for impact—”the place they’ll be placing the bar.”

If all goes consistent with plan—and things regularly do in Handler’s world, even supposing she insists she never has a plan—the forty one-year-previous humorist grew to become E! network famous person grew to become streaming pioneer will probably be spending a big chunk of the following a couple of years inside of this soundstage. the exact contours of the exhibit are still being worked out by using Handler’s staff of 50 producers, writers, editors, and researchers. What’s certain is that the program, referred to as Chelsea, will circulation three nights per week—Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays—and feature interviews with various company about frequently sensitive topics: “abortion, parenthood, the electoral college . . .” she says, by the use of examples, plus a standard dose of Handler’s bawdy, transgressive humor. it’ll function taped field experiences—mini versions of the 4 hour-plus Chelsea Does documentaries that debuted on Netflix again in January. There will be a live target market and plenty of wild-card parts; previous within the day, Handler held auditions for a child correspondent (“I’m on the lookout for a ten-year-previous with attitude,” she says). All of this shall be packed into a running time of half-hour, more or less. on the earth of streaming video, no one is gazing the clock too intently.

at this time, she’s in the midst of a series of creative meetings. “people come and pitch me ideas,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward the place a lazy Susan–model stage she’s proposed might go (“There’ll be a piece if I’m interviewing three or four folks, the way in which Dick Cavett sometimes did, and any other if I’m interviewing some of the show’s correspondents,” she explains). “That’s how I’ve all the time labored. give me choices. I’ll let you know what i like and don’t like. i do know what the show is. I simply can’t put it in phrases. but it surely won’t be regimented. You’re now not going to show it on three nights every week and have a gap monologue, a visitor, and a band. It’ll be completely totally different.”

in a single appreciate, it already is: It’s on Netflix.

speak shows on broadcast airwaves have censors, industrial breaks, and nightly scores. talk shows on common cable—corresponding to Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, on TBS—get away with racier conversations however nonetheless have to chop to ads (and care for jittery advertisers). Even pay-cable speak shows, like John Oliver’s, on HBO, observe rather conventional codecs—a guy behind a desk—and exist within an old school corporate paperwork. however a chat convey that runs on a streaming service—particularly person who prides itself on giving ability just about limitless creative freedom, that is intent on rewiring the viewing habits of the whole world, and that has a $6 billion funds with which to do all of this—can be pretty much no matter its host needs it to be. On Netflix, there are not any commercials, no ratings (the corporate has by no means published how many people watch its displays, so much to the annoyance of its competition), and no community notes, as a minimum none that Handler can don’t forget. the company “is amazing,” she says.

Netflix’s laissez-faire attitude toward talent has resulted in some groundbreaking applications, including Beau Willimon’s presidential soap opera, home of cards, and Jenji Kohan’s ladies’s prison dramedy, Orange Is the brand new Black (as well as just a few stinkers, just like the up to date Full house reboot, Fuller house). however, Handler’s show will mark a huge departure. For one factor, the company that popularized binge viewing might be releasing episodes in a radically old-fashioned approach: separately. each will go reside at 12:01 a.m. and stay on servers indefinitely, for subscribers to stream as they please—but it surely’s as close as Netflix has ever come to traditional appointment television.

What’s even more abnormal for Netflix is that the show will likely be protecting current occasions in a point of real time. this is a move that CEO Reed Hastings and chief content officer Ted Sarandos had hinted at all through an revenue name remaining October. “On the news aspect, we are indisputably being more adventurous,” Sarandos instructed reporters, moderately cryptically. When Hastings responded by way of asking Sarandos, “What’s the likelihood that we compete with Vice within the subsequent two years?” Sarandos answered, “probably excessive.” The web in an instant lit up with talk of Netflix’s grand new plan to amplify into information, and the streaming carrier speedy backpedaled. In a apply-up e mail, a company spokesperson tried to clarify these remarks via telling journalists, “We’ll depart the information industry to oldsters like yourself.”

Chelsea Handler Solves Your Thorniest Work problems

Handler, in fact, isn’t a newsperson. but discuss presentations are with the aid of nature tethered to the stories of the day, and having her on the air discussing them marks a shift for Netflix, remodeling the media company from a easy streaming service, similar to Hulu or Amazon top Video, right into a dwelling, respiratory part of the information cycle. “It doesn’t must be ripped from the headlines each episode,” Sarandos says of the express’s content, backpedaling somewhat bit more. “If Chelsea is choosing the right topics, the conversation goes to be round for a few weeks. however, sure, it’s definitely extra topical and well timed than what we regularly do.”

There are dangers for Netflix. in any case, the corporate is placing its money and popularity (and 90 minutes every week of bandwidth) in the back of a button-pushing, controversy-vulnerable comedian who once dressed a little bit particular person as Adolf Hitler to celebrate Germany’s World Cup win, whose sharp tongue has made enemies of everyone from Angelina Jolie to Nick Cannon, and who has posted more topless photographs of herself than Vladimir Putin (which can give an explanation for a few of her 5.eight million Twitter followers and a couple of.1 million Instagram followers). speak-convey hosts perform as brand identifiers: Jimmy Fallon is in some ways the face of NBC, just as Jon Stewart was once for Comedy critical. putting an unpredictable pressure like Handler in the back of a talk-exhibit desk (despite the fact that she doesn’t end up having a desk) may put Netflix in awkward eventualities.

for the time being, though, Handler is simply searching for a place to take a seat down. After winding thru hallways and taking some stray turns (“is that this an place of work?” she asks after opening a door into what looks as if a closet), Handler finally finds the only part of the soundstage with furniture—a large behind the curtain lounge with a few previous sofas presumably left in the back of by way of a earlier tenant. as the celebrity settles right into a sofa, the production assistant asks if he can fetch her a bottle of water.

“No,” she says, deadpan. “simply convey us a condom.”

Ted Sarandos used to be chatting together with his wife at the vainness fair Oscar party in February 2014 when Handler crashed their dialog. “She asked me if I was the Netflix man,” recalls the exec, who’d never met the comedian before. “She asked quite a few questions. She was actually tenacious about it. She wanted to grasp how things worked, how Netflix was totally different. It used to be a real deep dive. It was virtually as if she was once on a fact-discovering mission.”

Which, actually, she was.

at the time, Handler was once in the middle of her seventh 12 months website hosting Chelsea as of late, the entertainment-news channel E!’s standard five-day-a-week, late-night time talk exhibit wherein she engaged in gossipy banter with Hollywood celebs and poked enjoyable at her little-particular person sidekick, Chuy. The gig had made her rich (the community reportedly paid her between $eight million and $12 million a yr) and famous (each episode drew upward of 1,000,000 viewers) and even something of a groundbreaker: the first female comic to be successful at late-evening-television website hosting, one thing not even Joan Rivers used to be able to do. Reruns of her express aired so again and again a day that it occasionally appeared like the only factor on the community. There used to be even a spin-off, After today, a semi-fictitious truth sequence by which the solid and crew of Chelsea today used to be proven bickering and interesting in different backstage shenanigans. That drew 1,000,000 viewers per evening as well.

but after taping greater than 1,000 episodes (and interviewing almost as many Kardashians), Handler was once miserable and ready for a change. She was tired of celebrity gossip, appalled on the target audience’s starvation for it, and, most of all, fed up with being on the community that produced applications like go away It to Lamas and Bridalplasty. “It used to be extremely irritating,” she says. “You’re a mirrored image of the corporate you keep, and that i wasn’t impressed with any one. The folks I was once working with on the community aspect, they by no means could suppose big. I just needed to leave, to be elsewhere.”

Handler has depended on her instincts ever because she used to be a child in suburban New Jersey. “I by no means in reality have epiphanies,” she says, “I simply have thoughts and act on them. I’m impulsive.” Her dad was a used-automotive salesman and Jewish; her mother, a German-born homemaker, used to be Mormon. (“We celebrated each Christmas and Hanukkah, however I believe myself Jewish,” she says.) The youngest of six youngsters, she was raised with out a lot supervision, and it obviously left her with an impartial streak. After about “10 minutes” of neighborhood school, Handler says she left for L.A. to turn into an actress, moving in with relatives who had 9 children, three dogs, and a parrot. dwelling in what she calls a “disgusting” surroundings, she waited tables between auditions for commercials and sitcom components, growing increasingly more stressed. “I just wished my existence to start,” she says. “i wanted everything to start out. i wished my damage.”

It got here soon, within the not going form of a DUI conviction. On the eve of her twenty first birthday, whereas riding house from a bar with an equally sloshed buddy—”midway via [singing] the second chorus of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With somebody,’ ” as Handler describes the incident in her 2008 absolute best-promoting memoir (the second of 5), Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea—she was once pulled over by using the police. After a night in detention center, she was once sentenced to DUI classes, and it was there, while regaling fellow offenders with the main points of her arrest (like how she referred to as the white cops who busted her “racists” and drunkenly complained about being “racially profiled”), that she realized her calling. “you should do stand-up,” her DUI classmates told her.

“Stand-up was once my entrée into the leisure world,” she says. “I didn’t must act out someone else’s words. I could just stand there with a microphone and no one would interrupt me. It’s the most narcissistic factor you must almost certainly do.”

inside about six years, she had landed development deals with Paramount and NBC. She scored her first regular position, on an Oxygen network sketch-comedy program referred to as women Behaving Badly (type of an estrogen-infused Punk’d), and started getting invites to appear on the E! network’s “countdown” studies, through which more than a few comedians riff on news and famous person gossip.

Ted Harbert, who was then the top of the Comcast-owned network, noticed her and noticed doable. In 2005, he provided Handler her personal sketch-comedy program, The Chelsea Handler show, which tanked. A yr later, he tried once more, giving her Chelsea these days. around this time, Handler commenced a relationship with Harbert (now chairman of NBC Broadcasting) that had E! employees gossiping round watercoolers for 4 years, unless they broke up. “Now that I seem to be back on it, it used to be very strange,” she admits. “It used to be tough. however my mom had just died. And he was once the president of the network. He used to be this older guy who concept I was the best thing on the earth. So I back the choose.”

As she says: She has ideas and acts on them.

Handler did so again in March 2014, a month after chatting up Sarandos at that Oscar after-celebration, when she decided to go away E! and broke the information to her bosses in a technique that most effective Handler might suppose used to be a good idea—by way of all but asserting it on The Howard Stern exhibit. “E! has simply turn into a tragic, sad position to live,” she said on the air. “They don’t understand what they’re doing, they have got no ideas . . . the whole lot they do exactly is a failure.” Handler says she used to be shocked when E! professionals assumed it used to be a ploy for a fatter contract. “because I felt sad, I just assumed that they knew,” she explains. “however they thought I was negotiating. I instructed them, ‘You don’t have to give me extra money. It’s no longer about that. I don’t care. I don’t need to be on this community anymore.’ ” An E! spokesperson says, “Chelsea referred to as E! house for seven years, and it’s disappointing that she continues to criticize the network that launched her profession.”

Handler’s subsequent move changed into a topic of extreme hypothesis in the tv world. That spring, the late-evening airwaves had been in flux. At CBS, Letterman had introduced his retirement from Late express, and Craig Ferguson’s contract with The Late Late show was once about to run out. as soon as Handler left E!, rumors began to flow into that she used to be after a kind of jobs. An Instagram photograph that she posted exhibiting a packet of papers with the CBS brand on them and a caption studying “trade meeting” didn’t do rather a lot to dispel this speak. but Handler was once merely stirring the pot. “those were just conferences that folks wished to take,” she says. “I used to be supplied a couple of jobs. I was once offered syndication late-evening shows. but they have been all conversations that didn’t get a long way, as a result of there used to be no point. I was once by no means interested. I didn’t need to step into any person else’s shoes. I didn’t wish to be on some other late-night time express doing the same shit once more.”

What she was keen on—and why she sought out Sarandos at that birthday celebration—used to be Netflix. “home of playing cards was once on, and that i just notion it used to be cool,” she says. “i thought they had been sensible, that they knew what they’re doing, and that I might do one thing totally different there. i thought, I want to work at that desk.”

She asked her supervisor, Irving Azoff, to arrange a gathering with “the Netflix guy” on the streaming provider’s Beverly Hills headquarters. (Azoff did nothing to dissuade her. “He never tells me what to do—he is aware of better,” she says.) Sarandos, who attended the assembly, together with Netflix’s VP of content acquisition, Lisa Nishimura, and VP of original content, Cindy Holland, was once “shocked that Chelsea hadn’t signed with one of the crucial CBS displays,” he says. “but it wasn’t like we had been taking a look to make a talk exhibit. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s find a host.’ She got here in, and we met, and it used to be extra like a kind of we-don’t-recognize-if-we-must-do this-as a result of-we’ve-by no means-performed-the rest-like-this-before roughly issues.” seems these are Netflix’s favourite varieties of meetings. “We’re all about experimenting,” says Nishimura. “And the timing used to be very good.”

even supposing Netflix didn’t do any formal crunching of Handler’s numbers—there have been no focus teams or analyses of her ratings on E!—the company had detected indicators that the streaming target audience was once receptive to a Netflix talk convey. “Anecdotally, for those who look at what’s going down in late night, an increasing number of people need shopper keep an eye on,” says Nishimura. “whether or not it’s digital clips of Fallon’s famous person lip sync or [James] Corden’s singing with celebrities in vehicles, you’re beginning to find that customers aren’t gazing late night as appointment television.” although Netflix is a closed device, it plans to share video clips by the use of YouTube and its social channels to drive viewers to the exhibit.

“near-reside,” is what BTIG analysis analyst rich Greenfield calls this new type of entertainment consumption. “individuals love the late-evening conversation, but they wish to watch it on their own terms. And Netflix desires to be a part of that.” close to-are living programming, he explains, fits with the company’s push to keep folks paying $7.99 a month. “That’s a very powerful factor for Netflix. They don’t care about nightly ratings—they care about subscribers coming again. And with Chelsea Handler, they see a skill with a passionate fan base and a person who knows use social media to power consciousness.” When Handler isn’t posting risqué pictures of herself (“i feel nudity is humorous, especially when it’s inappropriate,” she says), she’s tweeting out a cascade of zingers, put-downs, and comedic observations. “i discovered a section of pretzel in my undies this morning,” she tweeted recently. “Conclusion: I was intoxicated, unsupervised, and abstinent.”

quite, Handler says social media doesn’t come naturally to her. “Would I do these things if I wasn’t well-known?” she ponders. “No. If I didn’t have one thing to advertise, I wouldn’t. It’s simply something it’s important to do at this time. but once I got the dangle of it, it has been fun to interact with fans. As silly because it sounds, it feels good to do it.” It also makes sensible industry experience, no doubt providing leverage in negotiating with, say, major streaming firms. In June 2014, Handler and Netflix signed a deal reportedly valued at $10 million—or five instances what John Oliver is said to be paid with the aid of HBO—for the convey, the docuseries, and a stand-up special for Netflix (Uganda Be Kidding Me reside, launched in October 2015). Then she acted on impulse again, saying that she’d be taking a break. She didn’t come back for 18 months.

Handler is lounging poolside at her Bel Air house, getting excessive. after which doing leg squats.

She’s filming one among her discuss convey’s box reviews, this one focusing on a non-public trainer who believes that inhaling marijuana prior to a workout enhances the exercise expertise. He’s introduced complicated-taking a look vaporizing units, which Handler needs assist working—”I’m more of a drinker,” she says apologetically, after coughing up a lungful of hashish—as well as some brutal-having a look sports tools. A camera crew is shooting all of it, as Handler’s two furry mutts, Chunk and Tammy, watch with weary detachment from the opposite side of the pool.

Handler has shot various these mini doctors, not all of them in the comfort of her tastefully adorned residence—which occurs to be Esther Williams’s previous mansion, remodeled with ultramodern conveniences, including a guest bathroom with an electronic bathroom regulate panel so excessive-tech you need a degree in physics just to flush. last week, she had flown to Moscow (“a horrible position,” she notes, making a face) to do a segment on younger women within the Russian determine-skating software. subsequent week, she’ll jump over to Las Vegas to watch a hypercompetitive adolescence baseball event. There can even be segments on a vocal coach who teaches trans women methods to sound more female and a consult with to the house of a polygamist household. Judging from what’s occurring around her pool—Handler, high as a kite, swinging a kettle bell so clumsily it’s a surprise she doesn’t by chance propel herself into the pool—these taped segments shall be pretty hilarious.

however like her 4 closely promoted Chelsea Does doctors, which premiered on Netflix in January, they’ll intention to be more than only amusing. One reason Handler was drawn to Netflix was that she may specific a smarter, more intellectually curious facet of her persona. “once we were on the network, i can’t let you know how again and again we needed to take jokes out on account of advertisers,” she says. “It used to be consistent bickering backward and forward. that you would be able to’t do this, you could’t do that. There used to be no inventive license.” however with Netflix, if she wants to get excessive and do push-ups, it’s now not an issue. If she needs to spend half-hour discussing presidential politics, that’s cool too. If she wants to take an epic hiatus before beginning the express—touring the world, shopping for a house in Spain, and having a quick fling with a crew member aboard a ship—nobody goes to complain.

“I sat down at Netflix and told them I want to take [time] off, and then I could come back and do some documentaries, if they’d hook me up with a few of [the filmmakers] they’d get entry to to,” she recalls. “and so they were like, ‘nice!’ ”

The Chelsea Does medical doctors—about racism, marriage, medication, and Silicon Valley—had been Handler’s concept, but from Netflix’s viewpoint they have been a savvy segue into a chat express, a tone check for a new sort of Chelsea. They’re not precisely Ken Burns–stage productions, however they are undoubtedly extra sensible and thought-scary than anything Handler ever did on E!. in the Silicon Valley episode, she ventures to the tech capital to “talk to them about their algorithms—and in finding out what an algorithm is.” She rides a hoverboard, interviews an AI robotic (“Are you trying to annoy me?” it asks her), and pitches her own app, an iPhone application that fakes an incoming call or textual content as a way to sneak out of meetings (Gotta Go! went on sale on iTunes the week the doc used to be released).

“The medical doctors gave us the chance to check out a new format,” says Sarandos. “The interview type, the roundtables, the surface segments—all of those are issues in an effort to be within the discuss convey.” As Handler places it, they “served as a perfect bridge. i wished to show those that I’m taking an actual giant soar into something new, that I was reinventing myself.”

To continue that evolution on the debate convey, Handler has enlisted invoice Wolff, the producer who, in 2005, revealed an vague Air america Radio host named Rachel Maddow and became her into MSNBC’s No. 1 famous person (he left in 2014 for The View). “Chelsea and Rachel are if truth be told identical people,” Wolff says, “sensible, funny, arduous-working, and clear. while you meet Chelsea or Rachel, they’re just as they appear on tv.”

Handler spoke with a number of possible producers ahead of connecting with Wolff. (“We met at a hotel bar for one drink—and that became 10 drinks,” she says.) Wolff for his phase, preferred Handler’s creative instinct. “The vision was once essentially in place,” he remembers. “She instructed me that she wanted to put collectively a show in her voice, however that was once concerning the broader world.”

the method of constructing a talk show is all the time the identical, Wolff says, whether or not the host is a wonky Rhodes pupil with an Elvis-like ’do or a community faculty dropout (who says she reads seventy five books a yr and who has written five perfect retailers of her personal). “You spend a lot of time together,” he explains. “You to find out what she’s keen on, what she likes to do, the things she finds humorous. And over the route of weeks and months, you piece collectively a right kind type for her self-expression. You attempt to exploit the things that make that individual unique.”

What’s tricky about Handler is that the very issues that make her unique—an instinct to push buttons and a fearlessness about offending—aren’t characteristics most often related to discuss-express schmoozers. Netflix has content material deals with different stars—Adam Sandler, the Duplass Brothers, Brad Pitt—but the person the company has chosen to beam into subscribers’ bedrooms, evening after night, in one hundred ninety nations, happens to be the one capable of insulting entire nation-states with a single zinger (she still hasn’t apologized to Serbia after an offhand observation about that u . s . being a “disappointment” sparked a nationwide boycott of her E! exhibit).

nonetheless, Chelsea—and Chelsea—could also be of venture value taking. “Neflix is set achieving all 4 quadrants,” explains analyst Greenfield. “Fuller house could be very different from house of cards, which may be very different from Orange Is the new Black. And Chelsea is different, as neatly, which is what Netflix needs. in the event you think about what a video bundler does,” he goes on, “it gives a bit little bit of meals programming on a meals channel, slightly comedy on a comedy channel, slightly drama, a little bit of the whole lot. And that’s what Netflix is doing with Chelsea Handler—it’s offering a completely completely different type of content material. as a result of, remember, Netflix doesn’t in reality want to be a network, it desires to be a video packager. Its purpose is not to exchange HBO. It needs to switch Comcast.”

That stoned girl by means of the pool, lurching around with a kettle bell? She is merely its newest secret weapon.

A version of this text appeared in the may 2016 difficulty of fast firm magazine.