HBO and the challenge ahead

Prior to last week, when she was tapped as the new chief of HBO Entertainment, Sue Naegle had spent her entire career as an agent representing television writers. So this is a person who knows how the network process works, understands the ways in which proposed shows are too frequently popped into the broiler as raw filet mignon and somehow, many kitchen arguments later, slide out as blackened ground chuck.

"My biggest heartbreak as an agent was, I'd work with my clients and hear what they wanted to do and really get excited and really love it, take it into the network [or] wherever it was going, and then watch it slowly die, by a thousand people with different opinions," Naegle announced with a rueful chuckle last week. "By the end of it, people couldn't remember what they'd started with."

HBO was, for much of the last decade, the great counter-example proving that TV series could be created differently, using methods more favourable to passionate writer-producers, the people who dreamed up what became The Sopranos or Six Feet Under or Sex and the City. And Naegle left no doubt she'd like to make the pay-cable outlet every writer's dream destination once more.

"Development by committee or by patching together multiple people's ideas isn't the way to get great television," she said. "I think it starts with the writer. Somebody who's very passionate and has a clear idea about what they'd like to do and the kind of show they'd like to produce. When I hear that and see that in somebody's eyes, I always feel like I've got something." Whether HBO can maintain its commitment to great television in a rapidly changing media environment is, of course, the big question surrounding Naegle's hire, which was announced last week. She replaces Carolyn Strauss, a career-long HBO programmer nudged from the post last month.

The last few seasons have seen lots of high-profile disappointments for HBO. Not many fans lined up for quixotic campaigns to save the willfully perverse drama John From Cincinnati, for example, or Louis C.K.'s misbegotten sitcom Lucky Louie. In fact, subscribers and critics alike have seemed puzzled by much of what HBO's done recently.

"Interesting, smart, entertaining series" are what Michael Lombardo, Naegle's new boss and the channel's West Coast chief, said HBO now must find. "I use the last term specifically," Lombardo added, "because I do think if we can be faulted for anything, it was that some of our series did not deliver on that note." In other words, HBO execs seem to agree with critics that too many of their recent shows just weren't all that much fun to watch. That's a big admission for a place that's still regarded by many in the business as the cool kids' table. HBO retains a business model that stirs envy among rivals. Executives say that subscriber tallies, revenue and profits are at record highs (HBO has about 30 million customers, although that metric has never been accompanied by razor-sharp clarity).

But let's face it, it's not 1998 anymore. After years of watching HBO dominate the Emmys and critics' top 10 lists -- and nab sizzling ratings for Sopranos and Sex -- basic cable outlets got the message and started producing their own richly drawn, provocative series. HBO, meanwhile, tended to retreat into its silo. When producers came to pitch unusual shows about New York ad men in the 1960s and a crime-scene tech who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer, HBO slammed the door, decisions that many at the network came to regret. Mad Men and Dexter went on to become acclaimed hits for AMC and Showtime, respectively.

Naegle realizes the ground has shifted. "Now, unfortunately, there's lots of places that are doing things in the HBO model, in terms of structure and content and even language and nudity," she said. But "this really for us is an opportunity to do things that are unique."

Is Naegle the right person to seize that opportunity? Ordinary viewers may have greeted her ascent with a shrugging, "Who she?" But Hollywood history is studded with examples of agents who made the jump to executive ranks, with results ranging from the legendary (Lew Wasserman) to the bathetic (Michael Ovitz). Indeed, Chris Albrecht, the architect of HBO's original-series renaissance in the late 1990s who left the network last year amid a domestic-abuse scandal, once worked as an ICM agent.

For her part, Naegle comes to the job with several important advantages. For starters, she's the first outsider brought into a major post at HBO in a long while. Given where the network is now, a fresh pair of eyes couldn't hurt. At UTA, the big Hollywood agency where she had spent her career, most recently running the TV department with colleague Jay Sures, she worked with writers such as Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City, Men in Trees) and Jhoni Marchinko (Will & Grace). She once described herself to Variety as a "script pimp."

Those relationships will likely prove beneficial. Indeed, Ball is already shooting his next HBO series, True Blood, an adaptation of Louisiana-based vampire novels by Charlaine Harris (although the show was announced last year, long before Naegle took the new job). "We respond to the same stuff," Ball said of Naegle. "What's great about her is that she really loves television and how excited she gets about it."

That seems true. Naegle said she's crazy about Lost, Mad Men, House, Dexter, Weeds and Battlestar Galactica, along with "some reality shows." (Eagle-eyed observers will note the lack of half-hour comedies on this list other than Weeds.) Most shows she watches off her TiVo, although she made sure to tune in live for HBO's five-night-a-week shrink drama In Treatment. "That's been my latest sort of obsession," she said.

But maybe the most important quality Naegle will bring to the HBO gig is her openness, her sense that TV's next great hit will spring from some place entirely unexpected. "As an agent, I'm always careful not to discount someone because they'd worked on some show that I didn't like or had written a movie that I didn't care for," she said. "Television should be a medium that people can really jump in on. It should be wide open enough that if you can find a great filmmaker from Sundance, or you can find somebody who's sitting in Milwaukee and has just written a script that they love, then that could end up being a hit show . . . There's talent everywhere you look."

So can HBO's new entertainment chief realistically pull it out of its slump? Naegle is now charged with reviving a still-important network that is in serious disarray; a network that does not have an original series on the air at present -- and that will remain the case for the next five months. The miniseries John Adams wraps up in a couple of weeks. Generation Kill, a 7-part miniseries from Wire creator David Simon, will debut on HBO July 13. Both are one-offs that won't return. HBO won't have an original series on the air until September -- that's when Alan Ball's new vampire series, True Blood, debuts. Until then, aside from the usual array of original films, Hollywood movies, documentaries and specials … nada.

A year ago, The Sopranos went off the air, but it’s clear that things were already going wrong at HBO. The excellent historical drama Rome had died a too-early death and millions of Deadwood fans were dealt an cruel blow when a planned fourth season failed to materialize. It then emerged that HBO had passed on Mad Men, an AMC series from a former “Sopranos” writer that became the most acclaimed drama of the year. Speaking of AMC, director Darren Aronofsky is working on Riverview Towers, a new horror-thriller series, for that network. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the project had been in development at HBO for two years.

As Canadian TV critic Rick McGinnis put it, “AMC is this year’s Showtime, while Showtime has become the new HBO, and HBO is, well, the company that somehow lost Aronofsky’s project … while the Sopranos, Deadwood and Rome were all going off the air. Just what, precisely, is HBO actually doing these days?”

Well, last year the network spent a reported $25 million making six episodes of the Linda Bloodworth-Thomason series 12 Miles of Bad Road, which the channel found wanting and won’t air. Now HBO executives must endure the embarrassing spectacle of Bloodworth-Thomason sending DVDs of 12 Miles to critics and airing her grievances in the press in a quixotic attempt to make a sale at another network. “HBO … apparently didn't like the broad tone of the series. And they are right, it's ridiculously broad. But someone should have figured that out, oh, about $20 million ago at least,” San Francisco Chronicle critic Tim Goodman recently wrote. “You don't hire Bloodworth for dramedy and not expect to get broad sass. It's what she does. Waiting for six completed episodes is just bad management rooted in either fear or [incompetence].”

Over the next few months, things won’t get any easier for HBO. Other cable networks will spend the summer doing what they’ve done since The Sopranos exited -- stealing HBO’s thunder. As Mediaweek noted, "the sharks are circling." USA, TNT, FX, Showtime and AMC all have ambitious slates of new and returning originals planned for 2008, and the summer season, on cable anyway, will be especially crowded. Mad Men, USA’s Burn Notice, TNT’s The Closer, and Showtime’s Weeds, as well as a host of new shows from various cable networks will be soaking up media attention and grabbing viewers' eyeballs while HBO sits on the sidelines.

In the last year or so, we’ve enjoyed HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, Tell Me You Love Me, and In Treatment, all of which drew some of that elusive media buzz that HBO so depends on. But those programmes lacked the broad appeal that Sex and the City and The Sopranos had – and HBO needs those kinds of big-tent shows to keep a large chunk of those 30 million subscribers happy.

We look forward to True Blood, but that's the network's only big premiere this year, although it's hoped that Entourage, which also returns that month, will be as sharp as it was in its early days, not the bloated parody of itself it has become. As for new seasons of Tell Me You Love Me, Big Love, Flight of the Conchords and the new series based on the The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, we’ll have to wait until 2009 for those programmes, according to HBO. (There’s a hopeful sign for those who want another season of In Treatment -- Naegle made positive comments about it in a New York Times piece.)

And according to Variety, "in the pilot pipeline are the David Milch-Bill Clark cop entry Last of the Ninth, the biker drama 1 Percent, the laffer Driving Around with Joni, the Barry Sonnenfeld-helmed Suburban Shootout, Darren Star's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and the Bob Odenkirk/David Cross comedy David's Situation."

HBO executives probably just want to forget the year that’s passed since Tony Soprano exited the scene, and get through 2008 as best they can. In fairness to Naegle, we should give her until this time next year to assemble a full slate of programmes that reflects her creative vision. Then we can decide whether HBO’s top executives -- none of whom come from the creative side of the business, as a recent Business Week piece points out -- made the right decision in hiring her.

Actually, it may not be fair to ask whether one person can return HBO to its former status as TV’s creative leader. At this point, just pulling the channel out of this slump will be enough of a challenge.