Come King.. HBO changed television forever, but is its crown under threat in the age of streaming and Trump? | television

IThis is not TV. “It’s HBO.” It may have seemed like a hollow boast at the time, but this powerfully assertive slogan marked the beginning of a new era in small-screen entertainment. The slogan was a statement about what the American cable network aspired to be, but it was also an implicit rejection of what most TV stations were like in 1996. It seemed like a brave move: at that point, there wasn’t much foundation for it yet.

HBO (Home Box Office) started out in 1972 as a subscription service promoting a mix of movies and sports. But by the late 1980s, that show was outdated; Threatened by the spread of networks, the protection provided by large studios, and increasing competition. Original made-for-TV content was the obvious way forward. But how do you find a niche?

With the launch of streaming service HBO Max in the UK this month, a similar question could be asked, but for very different reasons. What will HBO specialize in in 2026? There’s no shortage of potential platforms for so-called premium TV now. As a direct result of HBO’s trajectory over the past three decades, television now has a cult status and huge Hollywood names routinely appear on the small screen. But with Paramount’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO — and the suggestion that HBO Max and Paramount’s streaming service could eventually merge — can HBO retain its unique flavor?

Trust in HBO’s mission statement in the mid-1990s proved well-founded. In 1992, The Larry Sanders Show began reinventing the sitcom. Five years later, the first season of the prison drama Oz dropped; Open, morally dangerous and unabashedly brutal. The following year saw the release of Sex and the City; Very different in tone and content but equally coherent and ambitious. Over the next decade, the network became what it promised; Synonymous with great, original television. Just as the 1960s were for music and the 1970s were for cinema, so the 1900s were arguably for television: prosperity and abundance. The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Deadwood. Like the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, like Taxi Driver and Chinatown, these shows still sound like the gold standard; A beacon of what their art form can aspire to.

When David Simon brought The Wire to HBO in 2002, he gave the network a “huge Bible” outlining his intentions. It’s a wonderfully grandiose document, positioning his pitch as “a way of making statements about the American city and even the American experience. The big theme…is nothing less than national existentialism.” Encouraging this kind of creative and philosophical ambition is a tribute to Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht, the executives responsible for commissioning original programming for the network during this era.

Casey Bloys, who is now chairman and CEO of HBO Max, started working at the network in 2004. He remembers that period with pleasure. “I was lucky,” he says. “I grew up in that environment where it was about creativity and asking ourselves if things looked special and interesting.”

For the writers and directors, the experience was also extraordinarily liberating. Its creator, Alan Ball, remembers the genesis of Six Feet Under fondly. “Their only remark after I gave them my first draft was: ‘We really like this. But it seems a bit safe. Can you make the whole thing more complicated?” We shouldn’t underestimate the far-fetched nature of this approach – and the gamble it represents. “In network TV, all the feedback can basically be condensed into two ideas: ‘Make everyone nicer,'” Paul adds. Clarify subtext. Both are antithetical to great drama. HBO won’t have time for either.

Very quickly, the network made itself a refuge for rebels and malcontents. Unlike HBO, a pay cable channel, the US broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox – have relied on advertising revenue, which means providing a hospitable environment for new and existing sponsors. The result was a fundamentally conservative creative culture: nothing too dark, nothing too mysterious, nothing that could give a CEO sleepless nights.

If the creators of Six Feet Under, The Wire, and The Sopranos share anything, it’s probably the fact that they came to television with their eyes on other media. Paul was originally a playwright who had designs on Broadway. Simon was a journalist and then a novelist before working in television. And Sopranos creator David Chase never bothered to hide his disdain for television, apparently at one point regarding a TV pilot as merely a roundabout way to create an hour-long product that could eventually be made into a feature film. HBO’s selection of Golden Age shows has also been strikingly relentless. But it paid off in spades. The performances were more distinguished in themselves due to the absence of major stars.

The network’s decision to rely on this single embarrassment was a masterstroke. As Six Feet Under producer and director Alan Ball recalls: “The story is that they did a focus group with the pilot of The Sopranos and it got terrible feedback. It was one of the lowest test focus group scores ever — people couldn’t get the idea of ​​this hero who wasn’t very handsome.” Chris [Albrecht] He had the choice of modifying it or just putting it as it was. And he went with the latter. This single decision changed the face of television.”

This creative revolution was making waves outside the United States. As British screenwriter Jack Thorne (Adolescence, His Dark Materials) points out: “The extraordinary thing about it was that it wasn’t about giving the same old people money and giving them a chance to make it. They weren’t always TV presenters with a good track record.” In some ways, the golden age of HBO was a bridge to a future that had yet to take shape. Broadcasting was, at this point, the stuff of fiction. While these shows were still scheduled on TV in the US – generally speaking, you needed to tune in to them at 9pm on a Sunday evening if you wanted to be able to hold your own in front of the water cooler at the office on Monday – most British viewers initially consumed them on DVD.

Now, the DVD format feels like an interregnum. But at the time, DVD sets served an aesthetic function as well as a practical one. Looming, like books on a shelf, over the living rooms were traces of the occupier’s taste. Shows like The Wire were often compared to great literature – in part because auteur-driven television of this quality and ambition lacked at the time a traditional frame of critical reference. Thus began the concept of binge watching. But this was not reckless gluttony. This was TV bigimportant and uncompromising.

However, the openness of these shows and the sheer scale of production made them an ideal model for the early days of broadcasting. They had a moment between two TV models. “The old broadcast network model was to keep the show going as long as possible,” Paul says. “Hence the phrase ‘jumping the shark’!” But as the gold rush era subsided, caution returned. Six Feet Under was delivered as a pilot on a Friday and was given the green light the following Monday. Paul remembers waiting two months to find out if he would be commissioned for HBO’s follow-up to Six Feet Under, the vampire thriller True Blood.

Over the next few years, as the television landscape began to shift, HBO’s identity subtly changed with it. The network’s intermediate show was Game of Thrones — a Golden Age piece in terms of scale and production values, but as a fantasy epic drawn from existing intellectual property, it’s also something of an outsider. Game of Thrones has been a more conventional film, big and brilliant, but less innovative than its predecessors.

Soon after, as broadcasters arrived in earnest, the focus moved to something closer to the traditional UK television drama model, stand-alone mini-series. Paul sees the American writers’ strike in 2023 as another turning point. “There was a period when the competition among streamers included a feeling that scale was an asset,” he says. “But I think once the strikes happened and production was cut back, streamers realized they didn’t have to be competitive in terms of volume.”

With the launch of HBO Max in the UK, could a similar run of maverick brilliance happen again? For Blues, the distinction between the network’s golden age and the company’s place in a new phase of Paramount-owned multiplatform exuberance is controversial. “To this day, we don’t test things,” he says. “We don’t do research about what types of shows we should do or what talent we should work with. HBO has never relied on that. For me, it was just: ‘Is this a good show?’ Do we like him? Does it look different?”

As a writer on the front lines, Thorne is more cautious — not necessarily in relation to HBO but in relation to the current commissioning environment in general. “New talent is no longer trusted in the same way as it used to be,” he says. “A great idea is a great idea. That’s why Baby Reindeer is so important. I might destroy you, Fleabag. Giving individual people the opportunity to pursue a unique vision will sometimes lead to the extraordinary. I think ‘beautiful goodness’ is sometimes too trusting.”

Interestingly, this challenging environment may have an impact on the content of shows – and in unpredictable ways. As HBO Max prepares to launch in the UK, hospital drama The Pitt is making headlines. And in terms of form, it looks remarkably traditional – a throwback to the open, multi-season model that the Golden Age used to achieve that final effect. It’s basically ER meets 24; Every season after one shift, hour by hour, in a general hospital. It’s won multiple Emmy Awards, it’s impossibly addictive and it’s easy to imagine it up and running, in a style that would have been all too familiar to HBO executives two decades ago.

However, Bloys considers this a happy accident rather than another radical change. “There is no agenda on our part either way,” he says. “If Jesse Armstrong wants to do 10 seasons of Succession, that’s fine!” However, he agrees that it lends a useful air of continuity. “When I schedule, I know I’m going to run The Pitt for 15 episodes in January. That’s a great thing for a programmer.”

However, there are still challenges ahead. How will the bleak political context of Paramount’s victory over Netflix, which was also seeking to acquire Warner Bros. but pulled out of the deal last month, affect HBO’s production? Donald Trump had a lot to say about the Netflix show, and almost none of it was positive. Paramount’s father-son leadership structure of Larry and David Ellison has become increasingly sympathetic to Trump in recent months. At its best, HBO has often had a polemical bent — but it’s never had to take into account anything quite like the current Trumpian environment.

Paul is concerned about the options available to aspiring writers. “The consolidation happening within the industry means fewer buyers,” he says. “It means buying fewer shows. It means it’s very difficult for creators to sell quality scripted drama. It’s the hardest period I’ve ever been through. It also mitigates the risk.” HBO’s latest big play couldn’t come at a more critical moment. Even if it’s not TV, it’s still HBO. What HBO means has never been more uptakeable.

HBO Max will launch in the UK on March 26.