Going with the stream: Monika Shergill of Netflix on taking creative risks

Shergill speaks to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar about balancing high-quality programming with mass-appeal content to drive subscriber growth and why she views 'creative risk' as essential in entertainment

Monika Shergill is a petite, attractive, soft-spoken woman. As Netflix India’s vice president, content, she is also firm in the face of celebrity, glamour, and all the drama that comes with it. So when she walks up to the staff at The Tanjore Tiffin Room in Bandra, Mumbai, and requests them to turn down the volume of the music, they do so immediately. This, after repeatedly declining similar requests from other patrons. 

From a Shah Rukh Khan to a Vir Das, from an Imtiaz Ali to Hansal Mehta, Shergill (51) has dealt with the who’s who of the Indian media and entertainment business. In the seven years she’s been with it, Netflix has gone from floundering streamer to a brand with a clear identity, 20 million subscribers, and a bevy of awards and nominations for Delhi Crime, Vir Das: Landing and Amar Singh Chamkila, among other shows and films. A noise in a restaurant is hardly going to stand in the way of her lunch. 

How did a starry-eyed environmental journalist morph into this force that has helmed the India turnaround of the world’s largest pay streaming service, I ask.  “Journalism is about storytelling. At the heart of it is your curiosity, your empathy, your authenticity, how responsible you are about narrating people’s stories,” says Shergill. The move from doing environment stories for Living on the Edge (Doordarshan and Star Plus) to executive producing horror shows (Khauff, 2000) and comedies (Yes Boss, Office Office, 2001) for Sab TV to Satyamev Jayate (2012) for Star TV, happened by chance. But the skillset needed to move from one to the other, the ability to spot and tell a story remained the same, she reckons. 

In her third decade in the media, what she cherishes is an instinct for the audience. “Data will offer you a limited view of things, but instinct — how you observe, what you read, what your personal experiences are, how you learn to see stories from other people’s eyes — matters,” she says. “And so does how you constitute a team of people, each of whom brings in a slightly different perspective.” The team at Netflix brings that to the table, she says, as we turn to the menu on ours. 

Shergill loves food from the South, and has chosen the venue today. But The Tanjore Tiffin Rooms she has eaten at are in Goregaon and Andheri. The Bandra one remains untested. We start with a tasting plate of all the curries. We settle for prawns in a Madras railway curry and mutton Chettinad with appams and idiyappams. For starters, there is a sweet potato yellow chilli and surmai fry. 

Shergill (then Monika Dhingra) grew up in Daurala, which, in those days, was about 45 minutes from Meerut (Uttar Pradesh), where she was born. Her father ma­n­aged the power plant for the Daurala Sugar Works. The family lived in a gated co­lony that had people from all over the country. She grew up listening to Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, among other languages. There was badminton at the colony clubhouse and a movie fest on Saturday evenings on a rented video cassette recorder — or the VCR, as we remember it. It was an indolent childhood. “You can smell the su­mmer when you live in such a place. You can just lie down on the grass and waste time. It was so agenda-less,” she says smiling at the memory. “I really miss that,” she adds.

The agenda came with Prannoy Roy’s The World This Week, which aired on Doordarshan from the late 1988 till about 1995. The eighties and the early nineties was a media dark period, with only the state broadcaster and a few newspapers providing us a window to the world. Shergill was fascinated by this news show that encapsulated world events. 

“My decision to do English Honours (Miranda House, Delhi), to become a journalist (Symbiosis, Pune), was because I was very fond of The World This Week,” she says. After her journalism course in 1996, she had a choice between political reporting at the then Roy-led NDTV or environment reporting for production house Miditech’s Living on the Edge. She chose the latter “because I would get to cover issues, travel the country. That was a big thing at that time,” she says.

  The starters are good, but the main course is disappointingly banal. Shergill comments that the chef at this outlet is probably different before moving on to her time at Miditech. Coal mining in Dhanbad, cotton farmer suicides, illegal industries in Vapi are among a range of stories she covered over her four years at the production house, taking a camera crew into places where, usually, only print journalists went.

  In 2000, when NDTV was planning to open a Mumbai bureau, she shifted to the city with the idea of joining it. When that took too long, a restless Shergill went over to Sab TV (now Sony SAB). “That was my initiation into a linear network and what programming and entertainment at scale meant,” says she. From Sab TV she moved to Zee for a short stint before joining Sony as an associate creative director for fiction.

  By now Shergill had strayed way beyond journalism. What kept her interested? A choice of subjects and milieus that were different, she says, pointing to

  Bhanwar (1998-2015), a show based on landmark court judgements, or Rihaee (2005), based on real-life crimes against women, among others. These created a contrarian space at a time when saas-bahu sagas were dominating Indian television.  

Though she was far from environment, an area she keeps bringing up in conversation, the journalist in her was happy. But it came fully alive when she joined Star India in 2007 as head of non-fiction programming. Uday Shankar, himself a journalist and head of Star News, had just taken over as CEO. He was making sweeping changes to the network, which had fallen behind rivals. Satyamev Jayate (2012), a show she takes great pride in having helmed, was in many ways a turning point in popular programming. The deeply researched talk show, hosted by film star Aamir Khan, shone a light on some of the most difficult issues in India — from female foeticide to child abuse and medical negligence. It began a conversation on societal warts and the solutions therein. There were protests, government action, and a whole lot of noise — in a good way.

  The food continues to be a disappointment. The Chettinad curry is too salty and the payasam has sugar though the menu says jaggery. To add insult to injury, there is no filter coffee on offer.

  We decide to move to Napoli by Shatranj, just one level below, for coffee. It is quiet, dark and way more intimate. Maybe that is what prompts me to ask her about her brush with cancer. Shergill doesn’t hold back. Somewhere in 2015 she joined the launch team of Voot, the OTT from Viacom18 (now part of JioStar). In the April of 2016, soon after Voot was launched and life was hectic, she was diagnosed with galloping breast cancer. She was operated upon within 12 days of the diagnosis. “It was a defining phase of my life. It cleared a lot of unnecessary fog that you carry in life around how you’re with people, what things matter. I have ceased to be anxious about the future,” she says. It liberated her in many ways.

  Enough to be able to say ‘no’ to a show or a film, even in the face of the biggest celebrities? “To be able to land a ‘no’ in the best way and to take the bite out of a ‘no’, you have to have the best intention for the other person and care about how we work together, whether it is a celebrity or non-celebrity. And I care about what we deliver together,” says Shergill.

  That hasn’t stopped analysts and filmmakers from accusing Netflix of playing it safe on content choices. From a lunch companion, Shergill morphs, once again, into the head of Netflix India. She points to IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack and A Suitable Boy as examples of stories that sparked public debate. While both faced scrutiny, they also reflected Netflix’s belief in backing storytelling with complex subjects, thoughtfully and responsibly, she says.

  Perhaps some of the carping is also because Netflix is an “aspirational brand,” as Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax Media, had told me years ago. Netflix is the progenitor of pay streaming, operates in 200 countries, and is now firmly entrenched as the anchor service on the devices of 325 million subscribers, globally. In 2025, it made over $45 billion revenues. More importantly, it has set global benchmarks in production quality and diverse programming. Every creator wants a show on Netflix — either for bragging rights or reach. We end up discussing the intricacies of streaming for a bit. On almost every ‘issue’ I bring up — the greenlighting process, addition of popular programming — Shergill has an answer.

  “Everyone thought it was crazy to get Kapil Sharma on Netflix. And diehard Netflix fans are resentful, but the truth is, it (streaming) has to become TV because that’s what you are supplementing,” she says. “You have to broadbase and these are the steps to do that. You can’t be at the same level of subscribers for the rest of your life.” She pauses to take a sip of some excellent cappuccino. What most people forget is “streaming allows you to be bespoke. I can do a Kohrra, a Delhi Crime and at the same time do a Desi Bling or a Lock Upp,” she says. “There is no template, that is the biggest truth of being in entertainment. In entertainment, (creative) risk is the rule every single day.”

  She points out that for Netflix, the validation comes every month because it is the only service that offers a monthly renewal against the annual deals that others have.

  It is now 3.40 pm — over three hours since we met. The calls from her office are getting increasingly frantic. But Shergill has one last thing to say on the job ahead. Over a decade of being here, Netflix has done 200 originals out of India. Of these, 130 have been in the top 10 in over 76 countries. “Indian stories are travelling a lot. RRR and Heeramandi have come close to it, but have we had a true breakout like the Korean storytelling? Not yet. That is an opportunity. That’s where I feel the job is not done.” 

For now, mine is, I think, as we say our goodbyes.