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It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” It might have seemed like a hollow brag at the time, but this aggressively assertive tagline marked the beginning of a new era in small-screen entertainment. The slogan was a statement about what the US cable network aspired to be but, also, a tacit rejection of what most television still was in 1996. It seemed a brave opening salvo: after all, at that point, there wasn’t yet much basis for it.
HBO (Home Box Office) had begun life in 1972 as a subscription service touting a mixture of films and sport. But by the late 80s, this offering was growing stale; threatened by proliferating networks, the protectiveness of big studios and increasing competition. Original, made-for-TV content was the obvious way forward. But how to find a niche?
As streaming service HBO Max launches in the UK this month, a similar question could be asked, but for entirely different reasons. What, in 2026, is HBO’s niche? There is no shortage of potential platforms for so-called prestige television now. As a direct consequence of HBO’s trajectory over the past three decades, TV now has 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 eventually HBO Max and Paramount’s streaming service could merge – can HBO retain its unique flavour?
The confidence of HBO’s mid-90s mission statement proved to be well founded. In 1992, The Larry Sanders Show began its reinvention of the sitcom. Five years later, the first season of prison drama Oz dropped; open-ended, morally serious and unashamedly brutal. The following year saw the launch of Sex and the City; entirely different in tone and content but similarly self-possessed and ambitious. Over the next decade, the network became what it had promised; a byword for brilliant, original TV. As the 60s were for music and the 70s for cinema, so the 00s arguably were for television: a flowering and a profusion. 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 feel like the gold standard; a beacon of what their artform can aspire to be.
When David Simon brought The Wire to HBO in 2002, he presented the network with a hefty “show bible”, outlining his intentions. It’s a magnificently grandiose document, positioning his show as “a vehicle for making statements about the American city and even the American experiment. The grand theme … is nothing less than a national existentialism.” That this kind of creative and philosophical ambition was encouraged is a tribute to Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht, the executives responsible for commissioning the network’s original programming during this era.
Casey Bloys, who is now HBO Max’s chairman and CEO, began working for the network in 2004. He recalls the period with pleasure. “I was lucky,” he says. “I grew up in that environment where it was really about the creative and about asking ourselves whether things felt special and interesting.”
For the writers and showrunners, the experience was also unusually liberating. The genesis of Six Feet Under is fondly recalled by its creator, Alan Ball. “Their one note after I gave them my first draft was: ‘We really love this. But it feels a little bit safe. Could you make the whole thing a little more fucked up?’ The outlier nature of this approach – and the gamble it represented – should not be underestimated. “In network TV,” Ball adds, “all the notes can basically be condensed into two thoughts: ‘Make everybody nicer. And articulate the subtext.’ Both of those go against great drama.” HBO would have time for neither.
Very quickly, the network made itself a refuge for mavericks and malcontents. Unlike HBO, a subscription cable channel, the US broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox – relied on ad revenue, which meant providing a hospitable environment for new and existing sponsors. The result was a fundamentally conservative creative culture: nothing too dark, nothing too ambiguous, nothing that might give an executive sleepless nights.
If the creators of Six Feet Under, The Wire and The Sopranos shared anything, it was possibly the fact that they arrived in television with their eyes on other media. Ball was originally a playwright who had designs on Broadway. Simon was a journalist then a novelist before making television. And Sopranos creator David Chase barely bothered to hide his scorn towards television, apparently at one point regarding a TV pilot as merely a roundabout way of creating an hour-long product that may eventually be finessed into a feature-length film. The casting of the HBO golden era shows was also strikingly uncompromising. But it paid off in spades. The shows were more distinctively themselves for the absence of huge stars.
The network’s decision to lean into this single-minded awkwardness was a masterstroke. As Six Feet Under producer and director Alan Poul recalls: “The story is that they did a focus group with The Sopranos pilot and it got horrendous reactions. It was one of the lowest-testing focus group scores ever – people just couldn’t understand the idea of this protagonist who wasn’t super-handsome. Chris [Albrecht] was faced with the choice of tinkering with it or just putting it on as it was. And he went with the latter. That single decision changed the face of television.”
This creative revolution was making waves way beyond the US. 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, same old the money and giving them a chance to make it. They weren’t always TV showrunners with a great track record.” In some ways, the HBO golden era was a bridge to a future that was as yet unformed. Streaming was, at this point, the stuff of fantasy. While these shows were still appointment TV in the US – generally you needed to tune in at 9pm on a Sunday evening if you wanted to be able to hold your own at the office watercooler on Monday – most British viewers initially consumed them on DVD.
Now, the DVD format feels like an interregnum. But at the time, DVD box sets served an aesthetic function as well as a practical one. They loomed, like books on a shelf, over living rooms, monuments to the occupier’s taste. Shows such as The Wire were frequently compared to great literature – partly because, at the time, auteur-driven TV of this quality and ambition lacked a traditional frame of critical reference. And so began the concept of binge-watching. But this wasn’t mindless bingeing; this TV was big, important and uncompromising.
However, the open-endedness of these shows and the sheer volume of output made them a perfect template for the early days of streaming. They caught a moment between two TV paradigms. “The old broadcast network model was to keep the show going as long as you could,” says Poul. “That’s where the phrase ”jump the shark” comes from!” But as the gold rush era waned, caution returned. Six Feet Under had been delivered as a pilot on a Friday and greenlit the following Monday. Ball recalls a two-month wait to hear if his HBO follow-up to Six Feet Under, the vampire romp True Blood, would be commissioned.
Over the next few years, while the TV landscape began to shift, HBO’s identity changed subtly along with it. The network’s bridging show was Game of Thrones – very much of a piece with golden-era output in terms of scale and production values but, as a fantasy epic conjured from existing IP, also something of an outlier. Game of Thrones was a more traditional blockbuster: enormous, accomplished but less mould-breaking than its forebears.
Soon, as the streamers arrived in earnest, the emphasis moved to something closer to the traditional UK TV drama model, the self-contained miniseries. Poul sees the 2023 US writers’ strike as another turning point. “There was a period when the competition between the streamers included the sense that volume was an asset,” he says. “But I think once the strikes happened and productions were cut back, streamers realised they didn’t have to be competitive from a volume point of view.”
As HBO Max launches in the UK, could a comparable run of maverick brilliance happen again? For Bloys, the distinction between the network’s golden era and the company’s place in a new phase of potential Paramount-owned multiplatform profusion is moot. “To this day, we don’t test things,” he says. “We don’t do research about what sorts of shows we should make or what talent we should work with. It’s never been something that HBO has relied on. For me, it’s just been: ‘Is this a good show? Do we like it? Does it feel different?’”
As a writer on the frontline, Thorne is more cautious – not necessarily in relation to HBO but in terms of the current commissioning environment generally. “New talent isn’t being 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 May Destroy You, Fleabag, giving singular people the opportunity to pursue a singular vision will sometimes lead to the extraordinary. I think the ‘pretty good’ is sometimes overtrusted.”
Interestingly, this challenging environment may be having an effect on the content of shows – and in unpredictable ways. As HBO Max prepares to launch in the UK, hospital drama The Pitt is essentially its headline act. And, in format terms, it feels strikingly traditional – a throwback to the open-ended, multiseason model utilised to such definitive effect by the golden agers. It’s essentially ER meets 24; each season following a single shift, hour by hour, in a public hospital. It’s won multiple Emmy awards, it’s impossibly addictive and it’s easy to imagine it running and running, in a style that would have been very familiar to the HBO executives of two decades ago.
However, Bloys regards this as a happy accident rather than another sea change. “There’s no agenda on our part either way,” he says. “If Jesse Armstrong had wanted to do 10 seasons of Succession, fine!” He does agree, though, that it lends a useful air of continuity. “When I build a schedule, I know I’m going to have The Pitt for 15 episodes in January. That’s a fantastic thing for a programmer to have.”
Still, there are challenges ahead. How will the grim political context of Paramount’s victory over Netflix, which was also bidding for the acquisition of Warner Bros, but walked away from the deal last month, affect HBO’s output? Donald Trump had plenty to say about the Netflix bid, hardly any of it positive. Paramount’s father-and-son leadership structure of Larry and David Ellison have become increasingly simpatico with Trump in recent months. At its best, HBO has frequently had a polemical slant – but it’s never had to reckon with anything quite like the current, Trumpian environment.
Poul worries about the options available to ambitious writers. “The consolidation that is happening within the industry means fewer buyers,” he says. “And that means fewer shows being bought. And that means it is harder and harder for creatives to sell high-end scripted drama. It’s the most difficult period I have experienced. And it mitigates against risk-taking.” HBO’s latest big play couldn’t come at a more precarious moment. Even if it’s still not TV, it’s still HBO. It’s just that what HBO means has never felt more up for grabs.
HBO Max launches in the UK on 26 March.
