For almost all of its life as TV`s leading pay channel, Home Box Office has been identified with movies, and sometimes boxing.
HBO subscribers paid a monthly charge averaging about $10 to $12 nationwide because they wanted to see uncut recent movies and one-round fights featuring the likes of Mike Tyson.
The last thing they expected to pay for was a sitcom.
Now, HBO says, its subscribers are watching a sitcom called ”Dream On”
in unprecedented numbers. They are also watching another series, the horror anthology ”Tales From the Crypt,” with more loyalty than anything the cable channel has offered.
”Dream On” airs at 9 p.m. Sundays, with repeats at various times throughout the week, including 9:30 p.m. Wednesdays. ”Tales” debuts at 9 p.m. Wednesdays, also with repeats during the week.
”This is an extraordinary moment for pay TV,” said Bridget Potter, HBO`s senior vice president for original programming. ”For the first time, a pay channel has a hit series, and maybe two.”
Unlike the broadcast networks, HBO has never been in the business of finding hit series. But just as network TV has undergone radical changes over the last decade, so have HBO and pay TV. Like the broadcast networks, HBO is reacting to threats brought on by advancing TV technology.
First, videocassette recorders cut into the pay-TV franchise in movies. Now HBO faces the coming of multiple channels of pay-per-view movies. In the next few years, many cable subscribers will have a choice of 150 and more channels.
”Our overall strategy had to be rethought,” said Lee deBoer, executive vice president of HBO, which is owned by Time Warner Inc. ”You have seen us move gradually toward original programs.”
HBO`s identification has been evolving as well.
”We saw ourselves as complementing what the networks were doing,”
deBoer said. ”They did series, so series couldn`t be a complement for us.”
But now, HBO sees regular series as an opportunity, especially because the networks have had a hard time establishing new hits.
”The networks didn`t have a hot comedy this year, but we did,” Potter said.
Of course, a hit on HBO is defined differently. The channel has about 17.5 million subscribers, so its ratings represent less than 20 percent of a network`s ratings.
Still, Potter notes, in homes that subscribe to HBO, the July 7 season premiere of ”Dream On” averaged about 4.3 million viewers, and beat all of its network competitors in those homes.
Even more impressive has been the showing of ”Tales From the Crypt,”
which began its third season in June and for three straight weeks dominated the competition, including the three networks, in homes with HBO.
Largely because of the strength of the two series, HBO`s original programs, which include comedy and music specials and movies that HBO produces, were more popular with its viewers this season than the theatrical movies run on the channel.
HBO has done series before. It had a comedy based on professional football called ”1st & Ten,” and a horror anthology called ”The
Hitchhiker.” Neither attained the ratings that ”Dream On” and ”Tales From the Crypt” have reached.
Series typically make their profits not on their first run but as reruns in syndication. Therefore, most conventional TV producers would never choose to introduce a series on HBO because it would take so much longer to build up enough episodes to sell the show in syndication.
HBO buys only about 13 episodes a year for its series, as opposed to 22 or more on a network.
But Potter said the producers seeking to do HBO series were usually not from TV. The creators of ”Tales From the Crypt” included filmmakers Robert Zemeckis (”Back to the Future”) and Joel Silver (”Die Hard”).
The HBO shows also cross traditional network boundaries in content.
”Dream On,” which uses clips of 1950s TV series to illustrate the fantasies of a divorced book editor, regularly includes nudity. ”Tales From the Crypt” can go further in terms of graphic gore and scare tactics than
”The Twilight Zone” ever could.
Potter said HBO paid license fees for shows comparable to what networks pay.
But HBO doesn`t develop numerous series. Only one new show is in the works, a comedy called ”Sessions,” to be written and produced by comedian Billy Crystal.
