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.