New executive for HBO's entertainment division

Sue Naegle, a veteran Hollywood talent agent who helped bring the series Six Feet Under to HBO, was appointed president of the cable channel’s entertainment division on Wednesday and immediately charged with helping it identify and develop a slate of worthy successors to that hit series and, more important, The Sopranos.

Ms. Naegle, 38, was co-head of the television department at United Talent Agency in Los Angeles. She succeeds one of the channel’s longest-serving executives, Carolyn Strauss, who is being given a development and production deal inside the company. As president of HBO Entertainment, Ms. Naegle will oversee all series and specials.

Ms. Naegle’s task is a formidable one in which her performance will be measured against that of the executives who shepherded The Sopranos, one of the most popular series in the relatively short life of cable television and among the most well received programs in the history of the medium.

As The Sopranos prepared to make its curtain call last year, Showtime was able to steal some of its rival’s buzz with the comedy Weeds and the period drama The Tudors, while AMC drew rave reviews (in style columns as well as among television critics) for Mad Men, which was created by Matthew Weiner, a former writer and producer for The Sopranos.

Asked in a telephone interview on Wednesday whether Showtime and AMC in particular had earned a tip of the cap from her new employer, Ms. Naegle said: “Absolutely. I watch some of those shows.”

“They’ve worked hard,” she added. “They saw a chance to do things that were, truthfully, a little bit in the HBO model. They’re doing well with them. God bless them.” Like a new basketball coach inheriting a championship franchise that has struggled in recent seasons, Ms. Naegle sought to diminish expectations for herself, at least early on. “Not every show needs to reach the same size of audience, or same width, of a ‘Sopranos,’” she said.

As a foundation on which to build, Ms. Naegle expressed her enthusiasm for the HBO series Big Love, a sprawling, sometimes comic tale of polygamy; Tell Me You Love Me, which depicts an interconnecting web of couples and at times borders on the soft-core; and In Treatment, an innovative drama that recently concluded its first season, in which a therapist played by Gabriel Byrne sees regular patients on days that corresponded to the show’s schedule.

She also said she had high hopes for True Blood, a series that begins this fall and that she helped assemble (in her capacity as an agent) for HBO. It was created by Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, and seeks to depict vampires in Louisiana in ways that, Ms. Naegle said, were alternately amusing, scary and sexy.

Ms. Naegle, who began her career at the United Talent Agency 16 years ago, literally in the mailroom, also inherits a slate of pilots at HBO that are already being developed and could well yield a hit series or two. These include a drama set in Atlantic City in the 1920s (from Terence Winter, an executive producer of Sopranos); Suburban Shootout (a series about two rival gangs of housewives fighting over their idyllic town, from the director Barry Sonnenfeld) and 1 Percent (about an Arizona biker club, from Michael Tolkin, who wrote the film The Player, among others).

Asked in the same interview what had drawn them to Ms. Naegle, Richard Plepler, co-president of HBO, and Michael Lombardo, president of the channel’s programming group and West Coast operations, cited her sensibility as well as her reputation as an agent who worked closely with top writers in particular. Both said they hoped those relationships would prove to be of even more benefit to HBO now that she had moved in-house.

“Sue has always recognized what’s right for us,” Mr. Lombardo said. “Whatever she has brought us has been smart and on the nose.”

Mr. Plepler said, “We’re only as good as the people who come to work for us.”