By Jack Lechner
“I think that when your sole goal is to be good,” Carolyn Strauss, 43-year-old president of HBO Entertainment, says, “when everyone who’s working there has that frame of reference, then, right away, you’re dealing with something special."
So HBO’s business model is to sell quality, or the perception of quality, directly to the viewer, and that model in turn assures quality.
HBO’s single most critically acclaimed series is not The Sopranos, but The Wire, which gets a fraction of the ratings of the mob drama. David Baldwin, HBO’s executive VP of program planning: “We don’t have to have mass, broad audience hits. Because I have one segment of my audience base that do think [The Wire] is absolutely brilliant, and will not miss it, and that’s a large part of their faith in HBO: that we could make something like this—the story of why urban America is failing—that no one else would touch.”
In the late 1980s, HBO took a leap with Tanner ’88, directed by Robert Altman and written by Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, in which a fictional presidential candidate—more than 20 years before Ali G and Borat—interacted with real people during election season. The first great HBO series, Tanner had a BBC-style limited season, running as a complete 11-episode arc rather than year-round and open-ended. It premiered in February, 1988, ignoring the longstanding TV tradition of launching new shows in September. It was driven by strong-willed creators rather than a studio or a committee. And for HBO, Tanner’s most striking innovation was perhaps that its difference from network television could be measured in its intelligence and artistic ambition.
HBO assumed its present shape in the late 1990s, when it stepped up its initiative to create original series, largely in response to the sudden popularity of DVDs. HBO’s broadcast agreement for feature films originated in the days of videotape, a medium that people tended to rent rather than buy. Theatrical movies would start playing on HBO six months after they came out on video, which was usually six months after their theatrical release. But then consumers began to buy new releases on DVD, half a year before the HBO window. This meant that for much of its audience, HBO was showing old movies.
Broadcast networks were having their own financial crises, thanks to the dispersal of eyeballs to cable, the internet and video games. With the decrease in audience came a commensurate drop in advertising revenue, and that affected the networks’ ability to finance high-quality drama series. HBO was all too happy to step into the breach, with shows like Oz (something for the guys), Sex and the City (something for the gals), and then the behemoth hit The Sopranos (something for just about everybody who could afford cable). More than 25 years after its founding, the golden age of HBO had finally arrived.
Every golden age comes with its own anxieties, though, not least among them how long it can be sustained. HBO stands for something now—viewers have standards and expectations they associate with it, and executives can’t quite make things up as they go along anymore, especially after creating a model that can be imitated. Showtime is making real noise, with shows like Weeds, Dexter, and The L Word. (Not coincidentally, Showtime’s current president of entertainment is Robert Greenblatt, one of the producers of Six Feet Under.) Meanwhile, the FX network is striving to be “the HBO of basic cable,” and even the broadcast networks have gotten into the act, with “new and different” shows like Lost and The Office.
HBO has had to start behaving like a regular television network. After years of avoiding the vast and expensive inefficiencies of the Hollywood black hole called “development,” HBO has commissioned numerous scripts and potential series pilots.
HBO’s final advantage is probably its managerial stability. The average tenure of an executive in HBO senior management is 20 years. Maybe it’s the absurdly luxurious package of perks, ranging from lavish 401K plans to full-service private dining rooms; or maybe it’s just the feeling that to leave HBO is to trade down. Either way, HBO is the Roach Motel of television: executives walk in, but they don’t walk out.
Sheila Nevins has been head of documentaries for HBO for all of 27 years, but she still approaches every day with brio. “You know how you touch something and it has electricity?” she tells me. “Well, that’s sort of what it’s like to be at HBO. It’s like your skirt gets caught to your slip all the time.”
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