How HBO’s creatives survived corporate chaos on this week’s DecoderPod
In the early days, it was basically Charles Dolan, who went on to Cablevision fame and owning the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers. It was Dolan’s idea originally. He got backing from Time Life, which at that point was a magazine empire that was attempting to diversify. Dolan’s idea was basically like, “I’m trying to build out the first cable system in lower Manhattan.”
At that point, Time Life made one last investment and said, “You know what? Okay. We’re going to rent some space on this new RCA satellite that, in theory, could beam moving pictures to anybody around the country that puts up a little satellite dish.” They tested it with the “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match in the Philippines, and it ended up being this great success. They could, in fact, distribute it around the country.Once they made that leap onto the satellite, everyone else followed.
“They didn’t really know much about their subscribers, so HBO’s executives basically just had to wing it.”The good of it is, they didn’t really know much about their subscribers, so HBO’s executives basically just had to wing it. They had to decide, “Okay, here’s what we think is good. We think they want this George Carlin special, we think they want to see Robin Williams, and we think they want this movie about the Exxon Valdez disaster.
It seems like that has maybe diminished now, but it’s just a part of HBO’s culture. I actually want to start at the beginning and trace it back to that lack of data, which created some enduring cultural opportunities for HBO and its creative culture, but it also created this pretty massive blind spot.Yeah, in the beginning, they were trying to figure out the format and the mix.
In those early days, there was a code word inside of HBO for, essentially, more female nudity. These writers and producers of shows would get a script back and say, “Yeah, it’s a great script and we really like it, but could it include a little more ‘cable edge’?” That was the code word. The idea was that they were pandering to male viewers, and they could include things that you couldn’t see on broadcast television, like nudity, bad language, violence.
HBO executives were floored. They were like, “Wait, are there female viewers out there who are watching HBO and want to watch a show or movie about the female experience? What is out there right now?” What was out there was Darren Star, a former top producer on. He was shopping a project with Candace Bushnell, who was adapting her book from a series of columns that she wrote for thedebuting, HBO made a deal to doall the time, which is that data can only tell you about the past.
It was just a disastrous experience for all of these television executives within Time Warner, at HBO, and for all these cable brands that had to deal with these AOL managers. They had this famous culture clash. Eventually, the stock price craters and everyone gets tossed out. They say, “Okay, the AOL guys didn’t know what they were doing. It was a total mess, so we’re going to go back to letting the TV people run this company.
Many people have forgotten this particular era, but Blockbuster, in addition to ruling the home video market, saw Netflix coming up. At one point, they basically launched their own Netflix rival service, where you could go to Blockbuster and get DVDs sent to you via mail. They priced that lower than Netflix, and people were like, “Oh, is Netflix on the ropes?”
It’s fun to think of the counterfactual history of what the streaming wars might have been like if Time Warner had acquired Netflix. Which again, was worth about $1.4 billion market cap at the time they wrote this proposal. AOL Time Warner had a fund that easily could have paid for that. Of course, if they had acquired it, they probably would have screwed it up. It wouldn’t have been great.
Use Mike White as an example. He had a show on HBO that was a cult classic 10 years ago. They canceled it because it wasn’t watched, but they always checked in with him. “What are you working on? What are you thinking about?” By the time COVID-19 hit, HBO was like, “Okay, productions everywhere are completely ruined. We need a show that can be done quick, cheap, and preferably over Zoom so that we can get it on the air in four or five months.
That elevated HBO throughout the 1990s, throughout the 2000s and the 2010s. Felix and I used to joke about this. Any time we went to an HBO premiere party five or six years ago, I would see no fewer than 25 reporters and editors from, 23 or 24 of whom did not cover television and did not cover culture. They were just there because they were invited, because maybe there will be a time when Maureen Dowd wants to dedicate a Sunday column to a new HBO original series or a new HBO original movie.
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