HBO didn’t invent TV, but they did invent HBO. And much of modern TV, even if not made by HBO, is really more HBO than TV.
Whilst HBO is a brand name, it’s also quite a literal mission statement. Home Box Office. Bringing the quality of production (and star wattage) of the cinema to people’s living rooms – with the commensurate increase in price. The success of HBO has been a gamble on the fact that TV consumption has grown whilst cinema consumption has declined, not to mention a punt on shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, which would go on to be considered canonical texts in the history of broadcast media.
In the streaming war battles between goliaths like Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple, HBO originally stayed above the fray. They considered themselves a premium cable company, not willing to engage with the budget bunfight for library content. The launch of HBOGo, in 2010, was a concession to the changing nature of their user-base’s preference (more mobile, less plumbed into the structure of their home) rather than an attempt to compete directly with VOD services of the day. While Netflix rapidly became a household staple, an HBO subscription remained the preserve of TV aficionados and families with a bit of cash to burn.
There has been much amused murmuring, then, about the iteration (and reiteration) of HBO’s streaming brand, as it edges closer to genuine competition with its rivals in this space. From HBO to HBO Go, from HBO Go to HBO Max, and now from HBO Max to just Max (“drop the HBO, it’s cleaner”). The loss of HBO from the name of this service is not just a move away from the premium associations of its parent brand, it’s also a loss of raison d’etre. This is no longer about bringing the experience of the big screen into the home; this is just about “Max”. Whatever that is.
Prestige TV is in a funny place. I should know, as I’m a TV critic by trade. I watch all sorts of stuff, ranging from obscure British gameshows to the mega-hits of American television. The finance of prestige television is in a challenging state: after investments including Amazon’s deranged $1bn bet on a Lord of the Rings prequel, budgets are starting to tighten. Netflix is trimming fat like Jack Sprat, and even Disney, who have a near monopolistic stranglehold on modern popular culture, aren’t piping out quite as much cream as before. But streaming has also had one huge, and hugely detrimental impact, on television. It has destroyed the watching community.
This didn’t begin with streaming, of course. It began really, with TiVo in 1999, the service that allowed subscribers to schedule tapings and store digital copies of shows and films (they were also able, suddenly, to scrub through advertising and rewatch the bits were people got in and out of bathtubs). The idea, long assumed as fundamental to TV, that you had to be on the couch at a certain time in order to catch a climactic television moment, was quickly rendered moot. The advent of streaming only further laid waste to this quaint idea.
HBO has been the great holdout in retaining the linearity of their programming, and the perfect example of this – the apotheosis of the company’s resilience against the vortex of VOD – was Game of Thrones. The finale of season 8 of Thrones (an episode that was really pretty bad) was watched by 13.6m Americans. That’s an extraordinary figure for a cable company whose package is as expensive as HBO’s. Thrones was also said to be the most pirated TV show of all time (though I will concede that most pirates don’t tend to watch television in a linear fashion).
In the post Thrones era, there has been much speculation about what the next water-cooler TV show will be. And the reality is that there are lots of plausible candidates, mainly coming from HBO itself. The House of the Dragon was the most cynical attempt to reproduce the Westerosi formula – its season one finale was watched by 1.85m Americans. Hmm. More compelling perhaps was The Last of Us, their zombie adaptation. The finale there was watched by 1m Americans, but, unlike House of the Dragon, represented an audience growth over the course of the series. The Last of Us grew from 0.58m to 1m; House of the Dragon fell from 2.17m to 1.85m. Then there’s The White Lotus, whose second season gripped everyone that I follow on Twitter: it opened at 0.46m viewers and exited at 0.85m.
These figures are here really to illustrate the problem that HBO, the last holdout of great linear broadcasting, has had in replicating its Thrones-era audiences. For the past few weeks, everyone I follow on Twitter (who are, in their defence, largely journalists) have been obsessed with Jesse Armstrong’s lavish media satire, Succession. It is the biggest show in the world right now, by far. Newspapers carried front page obituaries when a character died; think-pieces have been commissioned at a volume to make civil servants sweat. And yet the final season of Succession opened with 0.59m measurable American viewers, rising to 0.78m for the penultimate episode of this series (the finale’s viewing figures have yet to be released). Compared with Game of Thrones or, you know, General Hospital, Succession would find it hard to substantiate a claim that it is truly water-cooler TV.
Now, these figures represent live TV audiences, and I don’t doubt that Succession augments its stats through international viewers, catch-ups watchers, pirates and more. But the feeling remains that the show is ephemeral, notable predominantly to those in the media (about whom, of course, the show is based). It speaks also to a fundamental disconnect between social media – which has never been more closely integrated into daily life – and viewing habits. Social media ought to be a huge boon to broadcasters, more closely facilitating the sense of community between geographically separated linear viewers, but, instead, it is a headache. Asynchronous watching makes real communication difficult, instead you get a cottage industry of catch-ups and recaps and endless rewatch podcasts, which take the live element out even of the discourse. People like library material, for sure, but that’s not why you join a service. You first go through the rigamarole of signing up, adding a credit card, promising you’ll cancel after a month (and then forgetting to), because you don’t want to miss the hype.
The problem is that HBO and Netflix and whoever, produce content in order to generate subscriptions. And across the board subscriptions are declining. Cost of living squeezes and the agony of choice (especially among providers of very similar content) mean that the spike precipitated by covid is now inverting. This is why Amazon has bet a $1bn on a Lord of the Rings TV show – it believes that the IP will unlock new audiences who wouldn’t otherwise subscribe. It is also why Netflix is now showing all eight Harry Potter movies on its platform, an expensive deal designed to try and arrest the rapidity with which Disney is drinking its milkshake. But Disney itself has suffered huge subscriber losses tied to its failure to renew rights to broadcast Indian cricket. In short, we are experiencing a period where it is very hard for any of these platforms to strategise a method for reducing subscriber attrition.
So why is event TV important? I think back to Squid Game, probably the biggest TV success of the past decade, when you factor production costs against audience figures (and word of mouth). Squid Game’s success had an element of virality to it, undoubtedly, but Netflix knew it had smash hit potential. I say this from a totally speculative perspective (and with no data to back it up) but imagine if Squid Game had been broadcast in a linear format. Imagine if each Sunday evening, viewers around the world had been required to tune in, live, until it reached its violent crescendo. The tension would’ve been excruciating; the community electric. I think the audience figures and cultural penetration (extraordinary as they were) would’ve been amplified, and, more importantly, requiring people to have a Netflix subscription in order to be part of the “event” would’ve generated, I’m sure, more subscribers.
That’s all totally speculative though, and easy to say after the event. In a way, the success of Squid Game, which came out of nowhere and caught everyone in the TV community off guard, speaks to the difficulty of this new era. Linear TV allowed you to force a product on your audience. Put it on at 9pm on a Sunday, play the trailer between ever show on the channel for the preceding two weeks, and drape the New York subway with seductive advertising. Do that, and you had a hit (at least for episode one).
Service atomisation and lack of smash hits is impacting every TV broadcaster. This may not, ultimately, be to the disservice of viewers (though the increasing habit of data-driven series cancellations is irritating a lot of fans). HBO has experienced a lot of change since it launched in 1972. It’s been owned by Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros, and come out the other side still the premier American drama broadcaster. But the focus on Max worries me. The company cannot exist on the viewing figures of Succession alone (“only when the last subscriber has been lost,” goes the ancient proverb, “will the prestige channel realise you cannot eat Emmys…”) but the focus away from the luxury of the HBO brand suggests that the age of linear TV might be done for good.
We are now better equipped than even, as a technologised society, to provide support for linear TV, just at the moment that we seem determined to forsake it. To me, there’s an opportunity there, for someone brave enough to say that a little more spoon-feeding, a little more hand-holding, might actually be good for viewers.
Below the line, for subscribers, some thoughts on Nick Cohen and Philip Schofield.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Future Proof to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.