Ah, the workplace – that reliable cauldron of petty resentments and micro-indignities. Maybe yours is overlorded by fusspots and fail-ups. Or perhaps you toil with vipers and snakes, like those who populate John Koblin and Felix Gillette’s meticulously researched new book about the never staid history of HBO.
Former “work husbands” from their days at the New York Observer, the media reporters (Koblin is on the television industry beat for the New York Times, and Gillette is an enterprise editor at Bloomberg Businessweek) were both working on book proposals about the same cable behemoth, unbeknownst to one other. When they got wind of each others’ projects, the writers took inspiration from the companies they cover and consolidated. “It was serendipity,” said Gillette. “We texted each other, and we were like, so we’re just gonna do this together.”
Being an army of two allowed them to divide and conquer the hundreds of interviews and plumbing of archives and oral histories that they would feed into their nose-to-tail history of a cultural monolith. It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution and Future of HBO begins 50 years ago, when HBO was a scrappy upstart that serviced no more than 375 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Its film offerings and live boxing matches would lure in more fans, many of whom couldn’t get enough of a young fighter with an entertainingly off-kilter personality. Mike Tyson, later convicted of rape, would become persona non grata to the top brass at HBO. But by then Tyson had already made his mark. As the book points out, he was the first in a “baroque procession of dysfunctional yet beloved characters” who would be synonymous with the network, and eventually set the prevailing tone of American prestige television.
Koblin’s family had a weekend tradition of feasting on his father’s ragu and gathering around the television for the Saturday night feature film that used to be a hallmark of HBO. While Gillette’s childhood household made do without an HBO subscription, he was an early adopter of The Wire. “So boring, like every other journalist,” he says, drolly. But this isn’t a fanboy project; the drama in their book is all to do with the cutthroat behind the scenes business.
Home entertainment has evolved over the last half century, and everything from the birth of VHS and the internet to streaming services like Netflix nipping at its heels has kept HBO on the defense and offense, pivoting and rebooting, again and again. Somehow, amid ever-morphing org charts, the network has managed to keep the lights on. “I knew something really interesting was happening in the middle of 2018 when AT&T assumed ownership of HBO,” says Koblin.
Swept up in articulating the original germ of inspiration, he goes on, “And then by early 2019, [longtime HBO executive known for championing the original programming that shaped the network’s powerhouse reputation] Richard Plepler left HBO sort of abruptly. I asked myself: what is the future of HBO with a company that has very little experience with entertainment?” Gillette came to the project from a similarly business-minded angle.
“It was clear to me that this whole cable satellite era of home entertainment was winding down, and there was this new thing happening with streaming,” he says. “It felt a little bit perilous back in 2019. Netflix had such a huge lead.”
But the DVD rental start-up turned streaming service didn’t have the same rich history as HBO, nor did it have the track record of creating the material that commanded water cooler chatter. HBO has always refused to operate according to algorithms or paint-by-numbers principles. Success wasn’t built on ratings, but making noise.
The level of detail to be found in It’s Not TV can be a bit much (unless you want to learn that lamb chops with fava beans and creme brulee appeared on the menu at a Santa Monica restaurant where two titans of industry met for lunch in 2007). But scattered throughout are tidbits that will fascinate fans of HBO’s roster of “masstige television”. Tony Soprano was originally called Tommy Soprano. Gary Shandling had a habit of firing writers willy-nilly, and sometimes disappeared for days on end during shooting. Curb Your Enthusiasm started as a “weird and experimental” hour-long mockumentary.
Starting with the boxing matches, and continuing on through cult series like The Wire, The Sopranos and Entourage, HBO’s programming has always teetered into undeniably male territory (before you bring up Sex and the City, please consider that its production was overseen and influenced by men). It probably won’t be surprising to learn that the shows were given the green light by a predominantly male corps of executives, in a culture with corrosive internal misogyny. Koblin and Gillette detail an especially troubling incident from 1991, when executive Chris Albrecht allegedly choked his co-worker Sasha Emerson, with whom he was having an affair, in his office. The network didn’t fire their star employee. Instead they prepared Emerson’s buyout paperwork. Emerson bounced around Hollywood jobs, her reputation spoiled by rumors, before becoming an interior designer to Hollywood insiders. Albrecht wasn’t let go until years later, when his 2007 arrest for strangling another girlfriend made headlines. (The book’s revelations about this horrific chain of events led to Albrecht’s most recent employer, Legendary Television, putting him on a leave of absence.)
The book also lifts the curtain on the heartbreak that was common to its stable of creators. HBO is notorious for offering development deals to rising screenwriters and playwrights, novelists and journalists, only to let their material fester in development purgatory. As Mike White, creator of Enlightened and The White Lotus, tells the book’s authors, years went by when the network wouldn’t green-light his ideas, including one for a comedy about a drag queen nanny. “Like, leave me alone! Stop calling me!” is how he summed up his frustration. And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to walk away.
HBO executives contacted White in the early days of the pandemic to see if he had any ideas. White proposed a show about rich people staying at a hotel (the remote location would help with Covid protocols), and banged out six scripts over a matter of weeks. The White Lotus went into production within months, and season two premiered this weekend – to rapturous reviews.
“He was a wonderful interview subject,” says Koblin. “I put in that interview request, like three days after the finale, which I figured was going to be too late, but we sold his team on it. We said: this is the last show we’re going to talk about in the book, and they said, alright, we’ll get you a half an hour with him.” The astonishing success of The White Lotus, a tiny, quirky experiment that nobody expected would outlast its initial six-episode run, wasn’t just a reminder that hits aren’t the result of algorithms. It speaks to the network’s uncanny stamina.
“That’s the thing I didn’t know about HBO until we started reporting the book,” reflects Gillette. “Which is just how many times a seemingly fatal blow has nearly wiped it away. And it’s survived every single time. HBO has survived every corporate takeover, it survived VCRs, it survives DVDs, it survived streaming. And now they have a new owner.”
It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO is out now
