With “The Sopranos,” TV’s Great American Novel, and “Sex and the City,” a hit comedy of manners, orgasms and women’s shoes, HBO has become the literary magazine of series television. Serialized within its pages are “Oz,” Tom Fontana’s innovative, brutal look at prison life, and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” an improvised piece of whimsy from Larry David, the author of “Seinfeld.”
As the pay cable outlet’s ad campaign tells us: “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” Embedded in this slogan is another message: If it’s not HBO, it’s TV — TV in all its pandering, compromised glory.
Because most of the economic forces that push the networks toward creative panhandling — namely, censors and the drive to capture the biggest audience — don’t exist at HBO, the writer-producer of a series there can actually claim to be doing art for art’s sake. The freedom implies a certain arrogance — you’re not in the TV business, you’re in the HBO business.
It’s an image that continues to gall many in the broadcast television business who marvel at the no-strings-attached buzz that HBO generates.
Network rivals gnash their teeth when “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City” claims an Emmy or Golden Globe. HBO may be hitting home runs, the argument goes, but how come nobody points out it’s playing with aluminum bats?
“If NBC only had to schedule `The West Wing,’ `Law & Order,’ `ER’ and `Friends,’ you’d say, `Wow, they’re the boutique network,”‘ says a veteran TV writer who declined to be named, echoing a commonly held view. Indeed, with uncut movies filling up the lion’s share of HBO’s broadcast day, the channel is at liberty to be thoughtful and exclusive, ordering 10 or 13 episodes of a series and calling it a season. All the while, its commercial network counterparts scramble each year to fill out schedules, ordering series they only half-believe in and deficit-financing star vehicles that end up being expensive embarrassments.
These days, thanks in large measure to three series — “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” which still airs on HBO in reruns — an increasing number of writers and performers are seeking admission to the HBO club, where the reward is more cachet than cash, because HBO series have yet to prove they can reap financial windfalls in syndication.
But what makes for an HBO series? And who fits the brand?
You could argue that the prototypical HBO writer-producer is Alan Ball, Oscar-winning screenwriter of “American Beauty,” and the prototypical HBO subject is death — something the broadcast networks wouldn’t touch. Ball’s new HBO series, “Six Feet Under,” premiering in June, is about the business of burying people, seen through a family-run funeral service. The darkly comic pedigree of the series matches Ball’s pedigree, which in turn fits the HBO brand: jaded former playwright who grew frustrated with his high-paying, joke-to-joke-to-joke jobs in network TV and wrote what became a mainstream literary hit at the box office.
HBO says it has about 40 scripts in development — everything from a series about hip-hop culture by novelist John Ridley to a comedy about an upscale Los Angeles Realtor. There is also a domestic-sitcom idea from comedian Damon Wayans. The script was pitched as a realistic version of the false, feel-good stories conventional network sitcoms churn out, which is interesting given that Wayans stars in one of those, “My Wife and Kids,” a midseason entry on ABC.
Both hip-hop and high-stakes real estate epitomize the HBO milieu. Marry such a subculture and a flawed, dynamic main character, and you evidently approximate the HBO brand. One writer in development there summed up the feedback he got on his pilot script this way: Make your main character less likable, and don’t worry about premise. “Just plop us in the world and we’ll find our way,” he was told.
Such notes run decidedly counter to the broadcast networks, where executives usually want likable characters or premises that are apparent early on. It’s a compromised process that can yield uncompromised riches down the road. At HBO, the riches are compromised, but the process isn’t.
That’s not to say the HBO development process is above the politics and marketeering that plague broadcast network programming. HBO, for instance, puts its pilots through audience testing, although arguably not as slavishly as the broadcast networks do. And sources say the channel has spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to develop a companion series to “Sex and the City,” an indication that target audiences have crept into HBO’s thinking.
“My biggest fear is that they’ll develop” a brand, says Bob Odenkirk, a writer and performer with a development deal at HBO and the star for four seasons with David Cross of the HBO sketch comedy series “Mr. Show.” To Odenkirk, the channel’s growing mainstream popularity is both blessing and curse. “If you attract this whole big crowd of people, you’re going to want to keep them. And to keep them you have to give them what brought them there” in the first place, he says.
“It’s all about enhancing the brand identity, and there’s no amount of money spared to do that,” says a source familiar with how HBO operates. This enhancing of the brand means unveiling new and returning series with proper aplomb. It means turning the third-season premiere of the Mafia drama “The Sopranos,” which returned Sunday, into a media-hyped event at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It means spending big bucks on marquee projects such as “From the Earth to the Moon,” the $70 million mini-series about the Apollo space program executive-produced by Tom Hanks, and “Band of Brothers,” a $120 million, 10-part World War II mini-series from Hanks and Steven Spielberg that will premiere in September.
It involves balancing art with the entertainment industry’s ceaseless vanity reflex.
Most especially, it means selling your network to the public not as a content provider, but as a lifestyle choice.
Asked to define what makes an HBO series, Jay Kogen, an Emmy-winning former “Frasier” writer (and someone who’s pitched to HBO), says: “You can’t find this on network TV, and Chris likes it.”
Chris is Chris Albrecht, and he is an anomaly — a 48-year-old programming chief who has been at his network for nearly 15 years, after past lives as a starving actor, a comic, an agent and a comedy-club owner and manager.
Indeed, Albrecht’s tenure running the Improv in New York presaged the kingmaker role he has come to occupy at HBO. Being in a comedy club night after night refined Albrecht’s comedic tastes; indeed, if anything gives HBO its unique culture, it’s that so many of those now in business there have deep roots with Albrecht dating to the fertile New York comedy club scene of the 1970s and ’80s.
“That’s probably Chris’ biggest asset — he was a friend for years to all these guys,” says Bob Zmuda, who briefly had an Improv act with Albrecht and now runs the charity Comic Relief. “This wasn’t some slick manager or agent coming your way. This was a friend. His whole relationship at HBO has been built on those friendships and one hand washing the other.”
The metaphor comes back in other ways when you ask people about Albrecht. It’s as if he’s not in the programming business so much as the loyalty business, with only two or three degrees of separation between Albrecht’s past and his current Hollywood dealings.
Albrecht dismisses the image of HBO as a club, composed of comedians and managers from his Improv days.
In a way, these comics were always on hand, back in the days when Michael Fuchs was the architect of HBO original programming and the network was heavily in the stand-up comedy business, banking countless one-hour specials but notoriously frugal with original series. Albrecht rose steadily through the ranks, assuming the top programming job ahead of the network’s current growth spurt.
Last year, HBO added 1.2 million subscribers, bringing its total base to about 26 million viewers. The increase has helped make HBO a key part of the nearly $7 billion in TV revenue its corporate parent, AOL-Time Warner, reported last year.
There is too much at stake nowadays, Albrecht notes, for him simply to hand shows to his old friends in comedy.
Certainly, one of the easiest ways to demonstrate that you’re “not TV” is to employ nudity, violence and profanity, something that nearly all HBO original series employ. The argument gets Albrecht going, because he’s heard it so often.
“We don’t look for things that are taboo,” he says. “One of the reasons we’ve held off doing a cop show is I’m not sure that we could do something better than `NYPD Blue’ or `Law & Order.’ … Because there’ve been so many things done on broadcast networks over the years, it’s hard to find subjects. I mean `Arli$$’ — sports. Because of all of their contracts with the major leagues, (the networks) aren’t going to do real stories about what happens in sports. It’s not taboo in society; it happens to be taboo for a business reason for them.”
“I say this in a lot of meetings,” says Carolyn Strauss, HBO’s senior vice president of original programming. “The shows have to become a little bit bigger than themselves … something that resonates in a larger way. I think that our best shows do that.”
Like Albrecht, Strauss is an HBO lifer. In 1986, shortly after graduating from Harvard, Strauss took a job temping at HBO in New York; she has been with the network ever since.
If Albrecht is HBO’s frontman, Strauss prefers to stay behind the curtain, a faceless name mentioned in Emmy acceptance speeches but not someone who relishes an interview. Like Albrecht, Strauss did hard time in the comedy clubs scouting talent in the 1980s, and like Albrecht, she is well-respected for her intelligence and taste, for “getting it.”
“As much as people might understand what it is we’re looking for, it’s the execution that is so key,” she says. “You could have done `Sex and the City’ for a network, but it wouldn’t have been the right show for us. … I think a lot of times you’re pitched an idea, and it comes back and it missed. And it’s because whoever’s doing it didn’t have that vision and voice and the means to execute it that works for us.”
