Life & Culture
Life & Culture
Russell Brand: Netflix to keep Re:Birth but stop promotion, Deadline reports
Netflix will keep Re:Birth, the stand-up special by Russell Brand, but stop actively promoting it, Deadline reports.
Russell Brand received a prison sentence of 10 years and six months for rape and three counts of sexual assault. Retaining a title in a catalogue and recommending it to viewers are separate decisions.
What Deadline reports about Russell Brand and Netflix
Deadline’s report, published on 11 November, says Netflix held internal discussions about the 2018 comedy special and decided against removing it.
Deadline says Re:Birth will no longer appear in viewing recommendations or searches using Brand’s name. The report says viewers can still find it through a British stand-up comedy search. Those are Deadline’s reported findings, not a catalogue test carried out by this publication.
An unnamed Netflix source told Deadline that the service prioritised viewers’ ability to choose what they watch, with recommendations and ratings helping inform those choices.
Keeping a title is not the same as promoting it
Netflix released Re:Birth as an original special in 2018. Brand performed it at London’s Hackney Empire. The reported decision would leave it available rather than remove it, while changing how it is presented to subscribers.
The report does not establish that every viewer, profile or territory will see identical search results. It also does not announce a wider change to Netflix’s rules on removing programmes.
Brand’s sentence confirmed by police
The Metropolitan Police confirmed the sentence on 9 November. A jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault.
The offences concerned four women, according to the force. The Netflix report concerns the separate question of how a streaming service handles an existing title following those convictions.
No accompanying YouTube or X embed is included in this report.
How should streaming services explain decisions about existing titles?
Archive photograph: Russell Brand at AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, 18 December 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped to landscape from the original full frame. The adapted photograph is available under the same licence.
