After spending over a decade cultivating a queer following with Jenji Kohan‘s Orange is the new black, Sense8 of Wachowski sisters, and the whole Ryan murphy artwork, including Ratched, the politician, and Hollywood, Netflix has spent the last week alienating them.

Flash point is the new Dave chappelle special, The closest, in which the actor devotes a lot of material to ridiculing homosexuals and trans, and describing himself as “TERF team”, which refers to the term “radical feminist trans-exclusionist”. Of course, Chappelle is a comedian who relies on adjusting our most sensitive buttons and has targeted trans people in his humor in the past. But the special blurs controversy and memory, incorporating the suicide of Chappelle’s trans friend, Daphne Dorman, into a special that also claims, without much humor, that “gender is a fact.”

Until the second memo went public, this was arguably seen as an internal Netflix issue because, while the Chappelle special created some furor outside the company, it’s in the streamer that the fallout is felt. Netflix employees, including a trans employee who tweeted about the special in a viral thread, attempted to raise concerns with Netflix executives about the content of the special, both before it went live and in the days following its release on the platform. (The concerns were dismissed, Bloomberg reports, by company executives, including the co-CEO Ted sarandos and global television manager Bela Bajaria.

“We are not offended” wrote Terra Field on October 6, a senior software engineer at Netflix, on his personal Twitter. In a thread that went viral, she listed dozens of trans men and women who had been killed. “Promoting the TERF ideology (which we did by giving it a platform yesterday) directly harms trans people, it is not a neutral act. This is not a two-sided argument. It’s an argument with trans people who want to be alive and people who don’t want us to be.

Shortly after, Field and two other employees were suspended by Netflix, apparently for trying to attend a meeting they weren’t invited to. The employees have since been reinstated, but the the damage has been done. Netflix has been proud of its inclusion in the past – they hired a diversity and inclusion manager in 2018, and in 2019 pulled a production from North Carolina because the ‘toilet bill’ of the State, HB2, has become law. Almost a decade ago Orange is the new black single-handedly changed the national conversation about trans inclusion, raising Laverne Cox to be one of the most recognizable trans stars in the world. Now, in a company where workers are generally satisfied, employees are said to have scheduled a walkout for October 20.

The suspension and reinstatement of employees amid the uproar was accompanied by two conflicting and frustrating internal notes from Sarandos that appear to have compounded the problem. The first, on October 8, insisted that The closest would not be removed, citing the fact that Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, Sticks & Stones, is the streamer’s “most watched, stickiest, and most awarded stand-up special yet” from the streamer. (The special won three Emmys.)

Certainly, Chappelle is loved, even and perhaps above all for its content which affirms the prejudices of its audience. But a review of internal documents by Bloomberg revealed that Netflix had technically lost money on Sticks & Stones—The cost of $ 23.6 million was greater than the calculation of the banner’s “impact value” of $ 19.4 million. This is a relatively high impact value, especially for a comedy special; more interesting is the cost of this fairly simple stand-up. (For reference, according to Bloomberg, Bo burnham‘s Inside special cost $ 3.9 million and the first season of Squid game cost $ 21.4 million.) Netflix invested substantial sums in the success of Chappelle – it reportedly signed a special $ 20 million deal that was extended.

And the comedian has a particularly close relationship with the mega-streamer, as evidenced by the company’s decision to remove the legendary 2003-2006 from Chappelle. Chapel Show service after the comedian has requested it. Chappelle recounted on Instagram at the time that he called someone at Netflix and argued his case – and soon after, it was done. (You must be wondering if the phone call was to Sarandos himself.) Chappelle added, “That’s why I fuck with Netflix, because they pay me my money, they do what they say they do. they’re going to do… And they’ve gone above and beyond what you might expect from a businessman.