It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
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Personally though, whose life is so great today that they need to escape by watching something depressing? Most people I know (and knew) were generally feeling beat down, afraid for the future, tired of not being able to say what they feel, etc.
The HBO content thesis of "just make it more fucked up" is not going to sell as well as it did.
I liked GOT because it was fun escapism into a simpler world, with dragons and wars instead of [insert tiresome/pretentious thing about Western society]. (Also because it was written in the 90s.) If they want to recapture their lost market they should try producing more optimistic/escapist programming. Adapt something that people want to watch. I'd pay for it if there was something like GOT.
Doubt that it will happen in the current cultural/political climate though.
In the 1950s and 1960s, even though the economy was doing great, there was a lot of darkness in the world. There was the cold war, which was terrifying (you kids think it’s bad now?), we still had World War 2, Korea, and even World War 1 veterans around. We were still coming to grips with The Holocaust, and counterculture was just starting up with The Beats (not the Liverpool moptops). We had mass starvation, race riots, and a lot of fear.
Fiction, in those days, was pretty fluffy and optimistic.
The last couple of decades, before the current one, had seen a lot less of that kind of darkness, and escapism became fairly dark. Dystopian fantasy became en vogue, etc.
Things are getting dark again. I suspect fiction may lighten up.
We’ll see…
Episode 1: 0.588 million
Episode 7: 1.083 million
For comparison, House of the Dragon ended the season with 1.855 million.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/03/03/the-last-o...
The ratings are also worth looking at: https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/the-last-of-us-ratings-1...
So I don’t think your assessment necessarily holds water.
The Sopranos started with 2+M 18-49 viewers per episode in season 1 and was doing 4+M by its second season, and then went up to 6-7 for a few. http://www.ratingsryan.com/2020/12/the-sopranos-hbo-ratings-...
Looks like their newer shows do a lot of cumulative views over time with streaming, but a lot less live (that's that 1M/ep number you linked, it seems like).
5+M live viewers weekly 20-25 years ago was a LOT for a premium-premium-cable network. Friends was in the 20Ms, broadcast, for comparison.
But in the streaming model era, the cumulative viewership is probably more important to the total revenue and sustainability, with one big caveat: if people sign up one or two months at a time to binge (like I do!) you're spending a LOT to make a show to get just 20 bucks or so.
People watched the shows live 20 years ago because they usually didn't have another option. If they missed an episode, and weren't lucky enough to have a friend that taped it, it frequently meant they were just going to have to have a friend summarize it for them while they waited for the next one.
Zaslav is making big picture moves like deciding how much budget there is for new content. But he’s not picking which shows to make.
I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s killing HBO because he’s largely left it alone. It’s the MAX half that got butchered—but that part isn’t really HBO and the overall service isn’t profitable.
The brand dilution is a real problem but that was done under ATT when they started HBOMax in the first place.
> Take the best moment in Aaron Sorkin’s imperfect show for HBO, The Newsroom ...
This moment is a speech that contains among other things the incredible claim that the US is one-hundred-and-seventy-eighth in infant mortality, something that Sorkin had from a table he read upside down.
That's character: not a brilliant hero, but someone unable to read a table correctly.
The American WASP prudishness needs to die. We love our violence in film and drama. We should love our sexuality too.
Game of Thrones was better for it.
I remember taxicab confessions being compelling because it was a rare example of people talking openly about adult things. These days that’s everywhere online.
Worrying about it is a generational thing.
edit: The parent comment originally advocated putting hardcore porn into all content, but was edited.
But the US is far from the only country that's so sensitive about it. Pornography in China is forbidden, in India is very iffy. In Islamic countries it can be extremely illegal.
Even in the Netherlands where I'm from movies have become a lot more prudish since the 70s/80s.
Wasn't even considered sexual content, and in no way shielded from kids either. The context isn't sexual, and it's a perfectly normal body part.
The sexualization of the human body is nothing but a cultural invention.
Somehow the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s running out of steam, and a correction taking place. A growing influence of American culture as well as Muslim immigrants, both more conservative. And perhaps feminism changing course.
I don't know. I feel that advertising is a lot less sexualized now, compared to the 80s and 90s when I was growing up in Scandinavia and the UK.
This would really not fly in this day and age.
You treat "It's part of human life therefore it should be on screen" as an axiom. But it's worth stepping back and considering other viewpoints.
I was just using pornography to illustrate the even stricter morals outside the western world. But like the parent comment I'd also wish we'd loosen up a bit.
That's a mischaracterization if I've ever seen one. My comment was originally written as this:
> Twitter and Reddit have shown that the population doesn't care if porn is mixed in with everything else. [Including hardcore porn.] It's fine, it's fun, and it's harmless.
I originally stated that Twitter and Reddit include hardcore porn as well. My intention was to demonstrate that nobody gives a fuck that that these websites depict humans having sex (because they don't). Reddit nor Twitter makes any attempt to scrub sexual content because that would be suicide. Tumblr is an excellent example of how prudishness sucks the life out of the things it latches onto.
These are major platforms people use at work and school and include as a normal part of day to day conversation. Journalists and academics use these platforms. Brands use them. Nobody gives a damn that they feature nudity or porn, or even (gasp) nude bodies moving in pleasurable ways.
HBO and Netflix already show boobs, penises, and vaginas. Recently, Netflix's "Sex/Life" showed a CG enhanced 10-inch prosthetic penis that blew up on social media [1]. Again, nobody cares. (Actually, they do care -- they love it, and they love to talk about it. My wife and all of her friends were talking about it all week.) It's a natural and normal part of human interest and entertainment.
The point of my comment was to show only a small percentage of the country gets wound up about this. People were thrilled that Game of Thrones was edgy and racy and sexy. That it wasn't just more violence.
It's time for those of us that aren't offended by basic human anatomy to move on from the prudishness and push our art forward. We're limited and held back when we can't invoke that dimension of humanity.
In any case, I edited my comment after I saw yours. You latched onto a three word sentence ("Including hardcore porn") and spun a wholly different argument. I didn't want the thread to get derailed further, and this simple observation didn't contribute at all to the substance of my argument.
"Hardcore", for the uninformed, does not equal "fetish". It's just intercourse.
Let me make my argument simple: it's okay for social media and films to show boobs, penises, and vaginas. Very few people care, and it's not going to kill anybody.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/sex-life-shower-scene-going-...
But "hardcore porn" was not an add on sentence, it was subject of first sentence.
I didn't "latch" onto anything. Your entire premise is that there should be more hardcore porn in content and anyone who disagrees must be some prudish WASP. I am not saying hardcore porn in itself is a fetish. I am saying wanting it to be a part of otherwise non-pornographic material is a fetish.
Good luck bringing that up at the water cooler at work.
The internet stole the show and actors started pushing back against it because it was still culturally taboo. Only now are we starting to see a big reversion and normalization of nudity in the arts.
Netflix and HBO are dialing up on nudity and sex. Millennials and Gen Z like it, and they have the metrics to show for it.
https://sea.mashable.com/culture/17369/heres-why-youve-been-...
Since then I think what you're seeing is more of a fracturing than an overall increase or decrease in prudishness.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/t... This talks about the small-screen stuff (and indie film) and dicks like you link out; but also points out the shift in mainstream cinema.
There's no more dicks or even breasts in tentpole blockbusters or the increasingly-adult-embraced "kids" films than there used to be. Even your R-rated stuff tends to have less of the sort of "coincidental" not-central-to-the-plot sex scenes than you would've seen a few decades ago. But what's left blockbuster film has found a place in "prestige TV" and by being moved less front-and-center, take-the-family-to-the-theater, it's been able to be amplified since entertainment as a whole is more fractured and it's less one-size-fits-all.
Outside TV networks, I would count Disney, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as also having global heft as brand names. None except Netflix has yet gained worldwide recognition for their shows and brands, yet, though (not even Disney and The Mandalorian).
[1] Cf. the rebranding of CBS All Access to Paramount Plus
Also, the new leaders at Discovery have a track record of saturating their viewers with shitty, low quality reality style shows.
That's because CBS, NBC and ABC are national broadcast networks while HBO is a cable network, like CNN. CNN is broadcast internationlly.
> only BBC has also transcended its home country this way,
That's only because of the british empire. Who but their former slave colonies watches BBC?
> None except Netflix has yet gained worldwide recognition for their shows and brands, yet, though (not even Disney and The Mandalorian).
Isn't Friends the most popular tv show worldwide? People may watch it on Netflix but it was originally broadcast on NBC as part of the "Must see tv" thursdays.
No. There are many lists of "top TV shows" or "most watched TV shows", some of which focus on the now, some try to be of all time. Regardless, Friends doesn't really crack the top 5 on any list that I can find (and isn't on most top 20 lists either).
While Friends is a favorite rewatch show, the overwhelming majority of people want to see the latest, they want to be part of the zeitgeist.
Some lists:
NBC also doesn’t need to be a name brand. It’s own by Comcast/Universal Studios which while it isn’t itself a name brand, its products have a worldwide reach.
I watched an episode and a half of that and gave up. Had enough of zombie movies. They're all the same.
> deals mostly with things that would occur between human in the context of apocalypse
Is a trope that has been played out. The walking dead (a show I did not like) had a dozen seasons of it.
But I agree. HBO is one TV service I don't mind paying annually for.
Lightning in a bottle is par for HBO.