I don't see how HBO can maintain their reputation and prestige with the way Zaslav is running things. Canceling niche, creative, and risk-taking shows and removing accesses to back catalog shows like Westworld entirely. Flooding HBO with cheap Discovery reality shows, and now forcing HBO Max to merge apps with Discovery. All of these are great ways to dilute the HBO brand and make it insignificant.
The article talks about how great the HBO gritty depressing character dramas like The Wire, The Last of Us, etc., were. That kind of content was interesting and fresh in the 90s and 00s.
Personally though, whose life is so great today that they need to escape by watching something depressing? Most people I know (and knew) were generally feeling beat down, afraid for the future, tired of not being able to say what they feel, etc.
The HBO content thesis of "just make it more fucked up" is not going to sell as well as it did.
I liked GOT because it was fun escapism into a simpler world, with dragons and wars instead of [insert tiresome/pretentious thing about Western society]. (Also because it was written in the 90s.) If they want to recapture their lost market they should try producing more optimistic/escapist programming. Adapt something that people want to watch. I'd pay for it if there was something like GOT.
Doubt that it will happen in the current cultural/political climate though.
Looks like their newer shows do a lot of cumulative views over time with streaming, but a lot less live (that's that 1M/ep number you linked, it seems like).
5+M live viewers weekly 20-25 years ago was a LOT for a premium-premium-cable network. Friends was in the 20Ms, broadcast, for comparison.
But in the streaming model era, the cumulative viewership is probably more important to the total revenue and sustainability, with one big caveat: if people sign up one or two months at a time to binge (like I do!) you're spending a LOT to make a show to get just 20 bucks or so.
Wait, so you're comparing live viewership today with live viewership when the Sopranos airs? Unless live viewership includes people who watch the episode within 2 weeks of airing, I don't see how this makes sense.
People watched the shows live 20 years ago because they usually didn't have another option. If they missed an episode, and weren't lucky enough to have a friend that taped it, it frequently meant they were just going to have to have a friend summarize it for them while they waited for the next one.
I suspect that fiction tends to be opposite of reality.
In the 1950s and 1960s, even though the economy was doing great, there was a lot of darkness in the world. There was the cold war, which was terrifying (you kids think it’s bad now?), we still had World War 2, Korea, and even World War 1 veterans around. We were still coming to grips with The Holocaust, and counterculture was just starting up with The Beats (not the Liverpool moptops). We had mass starvation, race riots, and a lot of fear.
Fiction, in those days, was pretty fluffy and optimistic.
The last couple of decades, before the current one, had seen a lot less of that kind of darkness, and escapism became fairly dark. Dystopian fantasy became en vogue, etc.
Things are getting dark again. I suspect fiction may lighten up.
Zaslav isn’t really taking creative control. Casey Bloys—longtime HBO Exec—is in charge of HBOMax programming.
Zaslav is making big picture moves like deciding how much budget there is for new content. But he’s not picking which shows to make.
I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s killing HBO because he’s largely left it alone. It’s the MAX half that got butchered—but that part isn’t really HBO and the overall service isn’t profitable.
The brand dilution is a real problem but that was done under ATT when they started HBOMax in the first place.
I subscribed to Discovery plus for a few months mistakenly thinking there were edutainment shows I could watch with my kid. There weren't. Also shockingly,they only a few episodes of Mythbusters. This Discovery plus is not the Discovery channel of my childhood. What a shame!
> That’s character in literature: not a stooge in your reverie of fair play and sound politics, but a creature of his time.
> Take the best moment in Aaron Sorkin’s imperfect show for HBO, The Newsroom ...
This moment is a speech that contains among other things the incredible claim that the US is one-hundred-and-seventy-eighth in infant mortality, something that Sorkin had from a table he read upside down.
That's character: not a brilliant hero, but someone unable to read a table correctly.
I am a fan of hbo, and have been for a long time, but I do miss the adult content: sexo urbano, showgirls: glitz and angst, taxicab confessions, etc. I vote to bring that back.
It's mostly a generational gap. A lot of us grew up in an environment where it would be a national scandal and the FCC would open an investigation if someone said a bad word on TV. The main allure of the shows you mention was their taboo nature. Ask anyone under 30 today if they want the same, and they'll shrug and go "if it makes sense in the script, sure".
You’ve also explained why it won’t come back, though: the internet.
I remember taxicab confessions being compelling because it was a rare example of people talking openly about adult things. These days that’s everywhere online.
It especially sucked because none of those major rape scenes were in the books. They were added by the show runners. Drago didn't rape Daenerys; he seduced her. Ramsey Bolton never raped Sansa (and also never married her, that was a different character entirely, cut from the show). Jaime never raped Cercei.
TV shows are about human life and sexuality is as much part of life as anything. A lot more than violence. I do also wish this wasn't such a taboo.
But the US is far from the only country that's so sensitive about it. Pornography in China is forbidden, in India is very iffy. In Islamic countries it can be extremely illegal.
Even in the Netherlands where I'm from movies have become a lot more prudish since the 70s/80s.
The parent comment wants to incorporate hardcore porn into all content. People watch hardcore porn to become turned on. Having hardcore porn in all content leads to either being turned on to the detriment of the rest of the movie or becoming desensitized to the detriment of their real world sex life.
You treat "It's part of human life therefore it should be on screen" as an axiom. But it's worth stepping back and considering other viewpoints.
I don't think the parent was suggesting putting hardcore porn in general content. They were just referring to a time with less strict morals and mentioned some mainstream entertainment titles of the era.
I was just using pornography to illustrate the even stricter morals outside the western world. But like the parent comment I'd also wish we'd loosen up a bit.
> The parent comment originally advocated putting hardcore porn into all content, but was edited.
That's a mischaracterization if I've ever seen one. My comment was originally written as this:
> Twitter and Reddit have shown that the population doesn't care if porn is mixed in with everything else. [Including hardcore porn.] It's fine, it's fun, and it's harmless.
I originally stated that Twitter and Reddit include hardcore porn as well. My intention was to demonstrate that nobody gives a fuck that that these websites depict humans having sex (because they don't). Reddit nor Twitter makes any attempt to scrub sexual content because that would be suicide. Tumblr is an excellent example of how prudishness sucks the life out of the things it latches onto.
These are major platforms people use at work and school and include as a normal part of day to day conversation. Journalists and academics use these platforms. Brands use them. Nobody gives a damn that they feature nudity or porn, or even (gasp) nude bodies moving in pleasurable ways.
HBO and Netflix already show boobs, penises, and vaginas. Recently, Netflix's "Sex/Life" showed a CG enhanced 10-inch prosthetic penis that blew up on social media [1]. Again, nobody cares. (Actually, they do care -- they love it, and they love to talk about it. My wife and all of her friends were talking about it all week.) It's a natural and normal part of human interest and entertainment.
The point of my comment was to show only a small percentage of the country gets wound up about this. People were thrilled that Game of Thrones was edgy and racy and sexy. That it wasn't just more violence.
It's time for those of us that aren't offended by basic human anatomy to move on from the prudishness and push our art forward. We're limited and held back when we can't invoke that dimension of humanity.
In any case, I edited my comment after I saw yours. You latched onto a three word sentence ("Including hardcore porn") and spun a wholly different argument. I didn't want the thread to get derailed further, and this simple observation didn't contribute at all to the substance of my argument.
"Hardcore", for the uninformed, does not equal "fetish". It's just intercourse.
Let me make my argument simple: it's okay for social media and films to show boobs, penises, and vaginas. Very few people care, and it's not going to kill anybody.
> Twitter and Reddit have shown that the population doesn't care if porn is mixed in with everything else. [Including hardcore porn.] It's fine, it's fun, and it's harmless.
But "hardcore porn" was not an add on sentence, it was subject of first sentence.
I didn't "latch" onto anything. Your entire premise is that there should be more hardcore porn in content and anyone who disagrees must be some prudish WASP. I am not saying hardcore porn in itself is a fetish. I am saying wanting it to be a part of otherwise non-pornographic material is a fetish.
Somehow the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s running out of steam, and a correction taking place. A growing influence of American culture as well as Muslim immigrants, both more conservative. And perhaps feminism changing course.
The internet stole the show and actors started pushing back against it because it was still culturally taboo. Only now are we starting to see a big reversion and normalization of nudity in the arts.
Netflix and HBO are dialing up on nudity and sex. Millennials and Gen Z like it, and they have the metrics to show for it.
There's no more dicks or even breasts in tentpole blockbusters or the increasingly-adult-embraced "kids" films than there used to be. Even your R-rated stuff tends to have less of the sort of "coincidental" not-central-to-the-plot sex scenes than you would've seen a few decades ago. But what's left blockbuster film has found a place in "prestige TV" and by being moved less front-and-center, take-the-family-to-the-theater, it's been able to be amplified since entertainment as a whole is more fractured and it's less one-size-fits-all.
I find interesting that HBO, a US TV network, has become a worldwide brand name in a way that CBS,[1] NBC, and ABC didn't; only BBC has also transcended its home country this way, and did so with a 50-year head start. To global audiences HBO is associated with Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, and other top-quality TV; The Last of Us seems to be on its way to adding to the list.
Outside TV networks, I would count Disney, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as also having global heft as brand names. None except Netflix has yet gained worldwide recognition for their shows and brands, yet, though (not even Disney and The Mandalorian).
[1] Cf. the rebranding of CBS All Access to Paramount Plus
> I find interesting that HBO, a US TV network, has become a worldwide brand name in a way that CBS,[1] NBC, and ABC didn't;
That's because CBS, NBC and ABC are national broadcast networks while HBO is a cable network, like CNN. CNN is broadcast internationlly.
> only BBC has also transcended its home country this way,
That's only because of the british empire. Who but their former slave colonies watches BBC?
> None except Netflix has yet gained worldwide recognition for their shows and brands, yet, though (not even Disney and The Mandalorian).
Isn't Friends the most popular tv show worldwide? People may watch it on Netflix but it was originally broadcast on NBC as part of the "Must see tv" thursdays.
> Isn't Friends the most popular tv show worldwide?
No. There are many lists of "top TV shows" or "most watched TV shows", some of which focus on the now, some try to be of all time. Regardless, Friends doesn't really crack the top 5 on any list that I can find (and isn't on most top 20 lists either).
While Friends is a favorite rewatch show, the overwhelming majority of people want to see the latest, they want to be part of the zeitgeist.
ABC doesn’t need to be a name brand. It’s owned by Disney - which is a worldwide name brand
NBC also doesn’t need to be a name brand. It’s own by Comcast/Universal Studios which while it isn’t itself a name brand, its products have a worldwide reach.
Network TV makes bad shows. They have a very different business model that basically boils down to ease of access where HBO is trying to differentiate their content.
You miss out a lot. There is barely any zombies in the show. It deals mostly with things that would occur between human in the context of apocalypse. Distrust and love, losing a loved one in an instant and the following despair, not giving up and loneliness when no one can afford to care, and revenge and other stuff. It’s mostly a character story, and there are barely action scenes.
HBO is the only streaming service I am willing to pay $15/month for. I feel like the quality of their shoes are better than any of the rest especially compared to Netflix. Netflix content is very hit or miss but the last bunch of shows and especially the movies were terrible.
When was HBO not an incredible and influential arthouse? Mr. Show ran from 1995 to 1998 and galvanized the careers and tone of comedians that would carry adult swim and comedy central through their golden eras.
Now if only HBO Max had a world class Apple TV app to match their world class content. Not expecting it to go anywhere but downhill from here what with the coming HBO Max/Discovery+ merger.
