Anurag Kashyap calls Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos 'dumb' for take on Sacred Games: 'Should have started with saas bahu'

Anurag Kashyap has some stern words for Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos after his statement on Sacred Games.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos recently appeared on Nikhil Kamath's WTF podcast, where he spoke on a wide variety of things, including the content on Netflix India, from Sacred Games and Heeramandi to CID and Kapil Sharma's show. However, one of his remarks on Sacred Games seems to have rubbed the show's co-creator, Anurag Kashyap, the wrong way. Kashyap lashed out against Sarandos on social media, calling him dumb for his take.

Anurag Kashyap has slammed Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos.

Anurag Kashyap slams Ted Sarandos

On Nikhil Kamath's podcast, Ted Sarandos said he was unsure if the idea of starting Netflix original programming with Sacred Games was the right idea, adding that they could have done something more 'populist' instead.

Sharing a screengrab of a news report on Sarandos' statement, Anurag Kashyap posted on Threads, “He should have started with Saas Bahu .. he would have done well. Which he is doing now Z I always knew the tech guys are dumb when it comes to story telling but tedsarandos is the definition of dumb is what I didn’t know . Good to discover that. This explains everything now.”

Anurag Kashyap's post on Ted Sarandos' comment on Sacred Games.

Sacred Games was Netflix's first India original. Directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, the show starred Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and was received positively upon its release in 2018. However, the second season had mixed reviews, and the show was cancelled.

What Ted Sarandos said

On the podcast, Ted Sarandos admitted that it took Netflix a couple of years to get it right in the Indian market. “Our very first Indian original show was Sacred Games. And I thought, ‘This is going to be great. People in India love movies. This is a TV show that feels as big as a movie, it has movie stars.’ What’s interesting about it is that it was very, very novel, but what I didn’t understand that we were introducing a brand new kind of entertainment in a country the size of India,” he said.

He continued, “For me, if I did it all over again, would I have done Sacred Games a couple of years later, and did things that were more populist (instead)? Maybe. But we knew that India was going to be a slower journey to get to where we wanted to get to. But it’s a great prize, at the end of the day. The addressable market is growing in the next couple of years in India, so it’s exciting.”