Men In 2014, Adam Sandler made what appeared to be a highly dubious choice – turn his back on the big Hollywood studios and work for Netflix. Just a few years earlier, Sandler had been one of the studios’ most trusted money earners. His production company, Happy Madison, enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership with Sony Pictures, making high-concept films that made a lot of money – Mr. Deeds, Anger management, You don’t mess with the zohanand Adults.
But the relationship started to wear out as some of Sandler’s recent films (notably, Jack and Jill, in which Sandler put on a dress, and This is my boy, in which he played Andy Samberg’s father) did not work. A Sony email hack later revealed that the suits said things like, “He’s not the guy he was and nobody can do that better for him.” Sony apparently rejected Sandler’s next film, Mixed, in which he met with his frequent costar Drew Barrymore. So Sandler took him to Warner Bros., where he also underperformed. Warners executives blamed the weather for the film’s box office failure, but Hollywood thought Sandler’s type of comedy had aged.
Four months later, Sandler and Netflix announced a surprising deal – he would take his next four photos for the streaming service. Sandler would turn his attention to. . . TV movies? It looked like he was finished. But Sandler ended up with an excellent prediction: it wasn’t just his comedies that were dying in theaters, they were comedy films in general, except those involved in animated films or superhero shows. Sandler’s films turned out to be perfect for Netflix – his comedy with Jennifer Aniston, Murder Mystery, was the # 1 streamer title in 2019 in the U.S. Great filmmakers like Alfonso Cuarón and Martin Scorsese followed Sandler’s example in projects of the caliber of Oscar. Now nobody thinks of Netflix as a downgrade.
This month, Sandler’s friend and colleague Kevin James, who starred in several Happy Madison films that made a lot of money, is joining him on Netflix, which in recent years has become the most important entertainment company in Hollywood except Disney . Netflix’s worldwide domination strategy of entertaining every conceivable niche has had some shortcomings: many of its efforts are not standard four-camera family sitcoms of the type that used to be a staple on CBS.
James is here to take care of this. Its broad and intermediate style is on display in The Crew, in which he plays the astute head of a NASCAR team built around an important but brainless young driver (Freddie Stroma) in the midst of fights with another team member, the daughter of the character James (Jillian Mueller). James is after the comedy that “inspires and uplifts,” he says in a Zoom call with journalists to promote the series, which opens on Monday (on the race calendar, it’s the first day of the week after the Daytona 500).
On the new show, James is clinging to his kind of genius and harmless comedy (the first scene sets the pace when members of the combat team drop everything to participate in the commitment everyone agrees on – salute the National Anthem flag). But he notes that The Crew it’s kind of a change of pace for him because it’s a workplace comedy as opposed to a home comedy like his previous efforts The king of queens and Kevin can wait (whose showrunner was ours National Review colleague Rob Long).
Under showrunner Jeff Lowell, The Crew is being done with enthusiastic NASCAR participation and promises to be inundated with internal details. James says he learned a lot of fascinating things about the racing game, which he has followed since he was a child and that his favorite driver was Richard Petty. As a child, James even dressed up as Petty once for Halloween: “with the cowboy hat and mustache and glasses”. Still, other sports were more important to him as he grew up. A decade ago, however, he was invited to be the Grand Marshal at a NASCAR event and was amazed at the energy level, which can only be suggested by television coverage: “It’s crazy when you go there,” he says . “You don’t know how much you go into this sport. And I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t done that. A live event is. . . a totally different world, from moving RVs, is unauthorized use in the center. . . the athletes, the sponsors, the pit team, the teams, the competitiveness, the fans. . . it’s a crazy event. “
He feels liberated by Netflix’s management style, which amounts to: We trust you. “It’s very different and much better for me, for sure,” he says. With network sitcoms, James laments “what you have to go through to get notes from everyone and along the line and everyone has to weigh in and you have to please everyone.” It is not uncommon for lawsuits to signal a joke in advance for potentially scaring advertisers. But “Netflix just does what they want, they give you the reins and let you go,” he says. “When you worry about ‘Hey, we can do this or that’, they’re like, ‘Just do it’, ‘Sure’.”
The Crew it was designed to be an easy watch that doesn’t demand much from the audience – it’s essentially Netflix’s Monday night CBS comedy – and James’s comedy won’t drive anyone away. I asked him about the dark clouds that rained over the hail of the politically correct over Comedyland and he said he was a little worried about it, but only as an observer. “My comedy is not affected [because] I don’t cross many lines, ”he said. But “it can be difficult when you’re trying to do comedy and you’re very censored. So it is a difficult area. It’s really. But I see things opening up a little bit and getting better and people able to do what they do. . . the goal is to laugh and nod and have a good time and we need to do that. And if we dissect everything too much, there is nothing we can do. James will let others handle the delicate things, but he proves that there is still room for uncontroversial comedies as well.