Richard Osman may be turning his hit novel The Thursday Murder Club into a Netflix feature, but it has not stopped him from roasting the streamer’s chief executive.
During a jolly curtain closer at the RTS London Convention, Osman and his The Rest Is Entertainment podcast co-host Marina Hyde, cast a satirical eye over the day’s speakers.
Osman poked fun at comments made by Ted Sarandos during his opening keynote, in which the Netflix co-CEO shared the secrets of streaming success to an audience of British television luminaries.
Sarandos added that “there’s no reason we couldn’t take 25%” audience share in the UK, which would more than double Netflix’s current viewership of 10%.
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Lacing his comments with sarcasm, Osman joked: “We’ve all been in the business a long time and, by and large, we don’t really know what we’re doing. He knows how to turn 10% into 25%, so [this] was the great takeaway: by creating programs people love. Some of the terrible stuff we’ve been coming up with over the years, that’s all we need to do.”
In later remarks, Osman added: “In his defense, he did mention The Thursday Murder Club, so that was nice. That was my favorite bit of his speech, and he didn’t say: ‘I’m shutting it down.’”
Sarandos visited the set of Thursday Murder Club during his time in the UK. “I’ve seen the scope and ambition of these British-made shows and films first-hand,” he said. “This wealth of talent is a great British success story.”
Amblin is producing the adaptation of Osman’s bestselling series of murder mystery novels, and the project has assembled a stacked cast.
Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie star as friends in a retirement home who gather to solve murders for fun, but find themselves caught in a real case.
Other cast includes David Tennant, Jonathan Pryce, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Richard E. Grant, Tom Ellis, Geoff Bell, Paul Freeman, Sarah Niles, and Ingrid Oliver.
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