EPISODE 812 HBO IS NOT TV. IT'S A SUBHEADING ON THE MAX PLATFORM.
Also, I've got a good grief guy.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
It’s been two weeks since we hopped on this merry go round, and when it comes to pop culture, boy have there been some doozies. Let’s get into it, shall we?
(Word of warning: there will eventually be spoilers.)
THE MAX WOWND UP (NOW WITH MORE MORE!)
HBO Max had such a big week, it gets the full wownd up.
Not the biggest news, but by far the weirdest out of HBO world this week was the news that Time Warner Discovery Etc., the company known for such things as not releasing Batgirl and removing Sesame Street episodes, has decided that HBO Max will henceforth and forever be known as Max.
You know, a term that signals big things, like “a lot,” or “extreme, circa 1993.” One that pops up right away when you search for it on Google, definitely ahead of a music site that no one has ever heard of, a UFC boxer, or Warner Brothers’ own site for a 2015 movie about a sad dog who has to learn how to be a hero again.
(I actually love the idea that the new site has Max the Sad Hero Dog as its inspiration.)
The decision, TWDE’s management explained on Thursday, was in part about protecting HBO, which, snark aside, I actually appreciate. As someone who grew up with HBO and its incredible instincts for quality programming, the idea that suddenly I could also find reruns of The Middle seemed to indicate the HBO brand was being strip-mined for parts. Honestly, even seeing Doctor Who on the site was like mixing ranch dressing and ketchup. Just, no.
At the same time, to now swallow the HBO brand entirely—it’ll be some kind of subheading you can go to on the Max site—does not feel um, great? Especially when it’s paired with what seems to be an argument from TWDE execs that HBO is actually an elitist brand, and that TWDE wants to appeal to a much wider audience. TWDE global streaming president JB Perrette said, “Max is where consumers can finally say, ’Here’s a service that not only has something for everybody in my household, but something great for everybody in my household.”
I don’t know what your 2023 bingo card has on it, but “Time Warner apologizes for HBO’s high quality, promises to do better” was definitely not on mine. (Then again, neither was “Harrison Ford does TV and makes me miss him like crazy.”)
Basically we’re looking at the most consistently impactful television brand maybe ever being absorbed into a new Netflix.
But it’s fine. The old one is doing real well.
Also this week in its game-changing More is Better than Better announcement, TWDE announced that it was relaunching the Harry Potter books as a TV series. Because having pissed off Gen X with the brand announcement, the company needed to pivot hard if they were also going to alienate Millennials and queer people.
In point of fact, if She Who Shall Not Be Named’s books were released today—well, first of all, if there were released today a lot of people probably would never have read them, because of her many and frequent outspoken attacks on transgender and nonbinary people.
But if those books were released today and their author had not gone off the deep end, they would almost certainly have been adapted as books, not movies. There’s just so much in them to explore, and also television now is so much more advanced in its capacity to tell those kinds of stories.
The problem is, none of that was available then, and in the meantime we’ve had these wonderful 8 movies with just the very best cast you could hope for—Love you forever, Alan Rickman—and their author has in fact said such horrible things that even the films’ stars have condemned her.
It’s such a weird choice, honestly, and definitely not one that suggests quality entertainment. If TWDE absolutely had to return to that well, it seems like it would have been better to reboot it in some dramatically different way—as an anime, for example. But sure, let’s just do it all over again.
Grogu, you’re a big fan of Harry Potter. What do you think?
But the real news, the big news, the news we care about, is that Logan Roy is dead, you guys. No seriously, he’s really dead.
I’ve said it many times before: I’m not the biggest fan of Succession. I just find it horrible watching these three adults get played again and again by their father, and yet still desperately want his affection. Honestly it makes my skin crawl. But having said that, last Sunday’s episode was a tremendous piece of work. The decision to have him fall ill and die off screen while we watch the kids on a speaker phone trying to ascertain what is going on made for just incredible drama and pathos.
Also, what it did to the kids, the way it brought them together and peeled away all their layers of hurt and betrayal, was so unexpected and so hopeful. I actually wrote about it a bit for America (and yes, I am unduly proud of myself for its title). I’m intrigued to see where it all goes. Based on this week’s ep, maybe pretty much exactly where you might expect. But still, no matter how bad it all ends, I think the thing that’s going to stay with me is this moment, and the sense that beneath the surface there is something good that connects these kids, a real love.
And that’s not something I would ever have expected to think about Succession.
For much of its history, this has been the opening of any HBO show.
For people who are not of a certain age, that initial static probably doesn’t make much sense. But for us in the know, this was what TV networks looked like after a certain hour. At the end of original programming you’d have the National Anthem and then…grey death.
In a sense by starting with static HBO was saying, we’re the place you can come to after everything else is shut down. “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” was the company’s saying for a long time. And its intro said the same.
That opening was also I think a kind of palette cleanser, a moment to clean out the cobwebs of whatever we’d just been watching or doing before we came here. And it gave a sense of something opening up. Walt Disney had this idea for his theme parks that he wanted you to have a sense of real entrance into the park. So at Disneyland you come in to via one of two small passageways that create that sense of moving into a whole new space.
For 40 years, HBO’s credits have been like that. They’ve been a passageway into new worlds. I guess we’ll see whether or how that continues.
And keeping with this week’s theme, here’s a real message in a bottle.
If you need a little cheering on at any point this week, try that HBO Feature Presentation Song. It’s a victory lap before the show’s even begun.