The World According to Netflix

TWIN: Netflix has already conquered the U.S. subscription VOD market, now it is setting its sights on beefing up its international presence.

MCN Take: According to Sanford Bernstein media analyst Todd Juenger, Netflix could nearly double its global subscribers to 300 million by 2026, an estimate even he says is conservative.

Read the full story at Broadcasting & Cable.

Netflix Renews '13 Reasons Why' for Third Season, Despite Controversy

TWIN: The third season will commence sometime in 2019, according to Netflix. The controversial series, about a high school girl who commits suicide, has received a torrent of complaints from parents groups since its 2017 debut, claiming it glorifies teen suicide and bullying.

MCN Take: Despite the criticism, the show is one of Netflix’s most popular. The second season, which debuted May 18, drew an average audience of more than 2.6 million viewers, with viewers watching an average of more than four episodes of the 13-episode series during its first weekend, according to Nielsen data.

Read the full story at Multichannel News.

Netflix to Adapt Dolly Parton Songs for Series

TWIN: The country music icon will executive produce an anthology series for which Parton’s songs will supply the plot. Eight Parton songs will be adapted into standalone episodes.

MCN Take: It won’t be the first time a Parton song will be adapted for video – her song "Coat of Many Colors" has been adapted for NBC’s Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors in 2015 and a 2016 follow-up, Dolly Parton’s Christmas of Many Colors.

Read the full story at The New York Times.

Rock Tells Obamas to Make Money Elsewhere

TWIN: Comedian Chris Rock commented on the reported 8-figure development deal former President Barack Obama and his wife, former First Lady Michelle, made with Netflix, telling The Hollywood Reporter that he did not want to “live in a world where President Obama is worried about his Rotten Tomatoes score.”

MCN Take: Rock, who signed his own $40 million deal with the streaming service two years ago, said he wanted the former President and First Lady “above that at all times,” adding he wants the Obamas to make money, just not like that.

Get the full story at The Hollywood Reporter.

Netflix Announces 'Orange Is the New Black' Season 6 Premiere Date

TWIN: The sixth season of the Jenji Kohan-helmed drama will drop on July 27, a little more than a year after its Season 5 debut, which depicted a riot at the minimum security women’s prison after one of its own, Poussey, played by actress Samira Wiley, was killed by a corrections officer. In a cryptic trailer for the new season, a wrecked prison cafeteria is shown, followed by a prison bus under the header "To the Max," suggesting that the women could find themselves in the maximum security section of the facility.

MCN Take: Kohan signed a multi-year deal with Netflix in November – she also is behind female wrestling-themed series Glow, whose second season will air June 29. Orange Is the New Black continues to be one of the most popular series on the streaming service.

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Read more at Deadline.com.

MTV will launch its original documentary division on Oct. 11 with a one-hour project, Prescription for Change: Ending America’s Opioid Crisis, the network said Tuesday.

The documentary, which will tackle the opioid epidemic, will feature a frank conversation between Grammy-Award winning artist Macklemore and President Barack Obama in which the two openly share their own experiences with substance use, said the network.

The world premiere of Prescription for Change will take place today at the White House followed by a panel session featuring Macklemore that will be streamed live by MTV News and at www.whitehouse.gov/live, said the network.

WASHINGTON — Forget cybercriminals and rogue states: President Obama is the biggest threat to a free and open Internet, at least according to the platform approved at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Monday.

“The survival of the Internet as we know it is at risk,” the platform says in its "Protecting Internet Freedom" plank. “Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government.”

Obama pushed for the FCC to reclassify Internet access as a Title II common-carrier service subject to some new regulations, which it did. It was a move Congressional Republicans fought and blamed on what they saw as the president’s intervention. They are also not happy with the administration’s decision to move oversight of Internet domain names to a multistakeholder model.

On Father’s Day, Discovery Channel and OWN will simultaneously air the documentary Rise: The Promise OfMy Brother’s Keeper, which will explore the lives and families of boys and young men of color from programs derived from the White House-inspired “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative.

I had a chance to speak with Rise producer Dawn Porter about the documentary, which features an poignant interview with President Barack Obama. Porter, who produced the HBO documentary Gideon’s Army, talks about her motivation in making Rise, as well as the documentary's significance and message in light of increased racial tensions in the country. An edited version of the interview appears below.

RTU: What was your inspiration in producing the documentary?

Dawn Porter: I was approached by Discovery to direct the film, and we had a lot of brainstorming about what we wanted to show. My Brother’s Keeper is an umbrella program, so as a director I had a creative challenge: how do you capture the spirit of what’s happening as well as show the variety of what’s happening?  Then for me as an African-American woman I’m very interested in social justice and truth, so it was important to me to let people tell their own stories and put them on center stage. So what we settled on was to spend some time with different programs across the country and show a range of approaches, and that’s how we got our main characters. In some ways each program that’s doing positive work for young men of color is a character in the show, but also each of the young adults is a character.

RTU: You were able to able to get President Obama to speak as part of the documentary. How important was his input in the overall message of the special?

DP: From the beginning Discovery had indicated that the President would sit for an interview, but he is the leader of the free world and he has a few things going on in his life. So we really didn’t have that scheduled until we had wrapped the shooting. Then we got the call and they allocated a short time for him, but they said the critical words ‘unless he wants to go longer.’ My guess was that he was really in a frame of mind to talk about the issues that we deal with in the special and the issues that prompted him to launch My Brother’s Keeper in the first place. His vision and his passion for what this is was really central – he spoke so movingly and long about his background and how crucial it is for him to do what he can and to use his office for that purpose. I hope that everybody watching understands the significance of that and having this President sit and talk about this topic.

RTU: Ultimately what do you want to accomplish with this documentary?

DP: I am an African-American woman with two sons aged 13 and 11, and I know the feelings I have when they walk out the door. Strangers don’t know what value my kids are brought up with – they see them and make judgements about them right or wrong. I wanted to let the young people and their families speak so that people can hear that our young men of color are not a problem to be fixed. They are young people who need what all young people need, which is our support, assistance and for us to pay attention to them and to be consistent. So I really wanted to give people an opportunity to hear from them and not to see them face down with handcuffs or having violence perpetrated against them. I wanted people to see them as people having all the struggles that every person that wants to make a good life for themselves have. What was so fantastic about this project was it was not hard to find programs or young people to feature.

RTU: Given what has gone on recently in the country regarding race relations, does it make the special that much more relevant?

DP: No doubt whatsoever. It’s something that we didn’t include [in the special] but I’ll tell you, the President said that when Trayvon Martin was killed it really redoubled his motivation to make sure that before he left office that this was launched and this happened. It feels like every month or every few weeks we’re hearing about another crisis, and I think people are in need of seeing what else is happening that is positive. I know I don’t have any desire to feel hopeless because that’s not acceptable. So I hope that while trying to acknowledge the real challenges everybody faces, we also acknowledge that this is not an impossible social condition, and that some people might need different support based on their individual needs.  We can’t just look at an entire group but we need to look at people individually. Also,I would love to see other directors and other producers bring their take to this – there are lots of voices that we should be hearing to show that this is what normal really is.