Names and faces
■ Jennifer Aniston calls it “amazing” that Friends still has an audience big enough to prompt multimillion-dollar business deals to keep it from disappearing on Netflix. “I find it amazing that it’s continued to have such love and such an audience and such an appetite for it,” Aniston said at the premiere of her Netflix film Dumplin’. After an outcry from fans, Netflix announced last week that it was keeping the adventures of Ross, Rachel, Phoebe and Joey available to subscribers through 2019 — at a reported $100 million price tag to the streaming service. “I think it says a lot about the show. Especially since it takes place at a time where it’s so different from now. You know, people actually spoke to each other and hung out with each other and talked,” Aniston said. WarnerMedia owns the show, which aired on NBC for 10 years ending in 2004. It won six Emmy Awards, including a best comedy actress Emmy for Aniston. Netflix paid more than triple the $30 million a year it had been paying for Friends, The New York Times reported, citing two unidentified people with direct knowledge of the deal. Friends could soon appear more places online. The Times said that nothing in the Netflix deal prevented the show from appearing on a streaming service that AT&T plans to launch in 2020.
■ Rome’s opera house Friday defended hiring conductor Daniele Gatti, who was fired by an Amsterdam-based orchestra last summer over sexual misconduct allegations. Teatro dell’Opera di Roma spokesman Renato Bossa said the theater signed Gatti last week to a contract running through December 2021 as musical director because, in a country with “rule of law, one is innocent until a trial proves otherwise.” Still, Bossa termed the allegations “certainly very grave.” Gatti has denied the allegations that triggered his firing by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The Rome opera theater quoted Gatti as saying about his new role: “I am particularly happy to be able to intensify my work here and link myself to a theater that has recently distinguished itself for the outstanding quality of its projects and the work of all the people involved in realizing them.” For several years, the Rome institution has been intent on improving its profile in a country where Milan’s La Scala reigns supreme in the opera world. The theater’s top executive, Carlo Fuortes said that hiring Gatti “will complete our plan to revive the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.” Fuortes lauded Gatti’s “extraordinary artistic career” as well as the “reciprocal establishment of trust he has nurtured with the orchestra and the chorus.”