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Competition: HBO's coffers full of pilots, wealth of choices
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Published: November 12, 2008
NEW YORK - When Alan Taylor is directing your HBO television pilot, it's usually a sign that the program is a lock to get on the air. Taylor, an Emmy-award winning director, has put his imprint on nearly every one of the network's major series, including The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Big Love and Deadwood.
But Taylor's latest HBO project, Bored to Death, is up against stiffer competition than usual. Penned by novelist Jonathan Ames, the quirky comedy about a frustrated young New York writer who moonlights as a hard-boiled detective is just one of nine pilots HBO has in the works. Many other shows from the likes of actor Jim Carrey, author Tom Wolfe and screenwriter Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) are in various stages of development.
"It will be a survival of what they consider the fittest," Taylor said on a recent cold autumn night, as he prepared to shoot a scene in a brightly lit TriBeCa art gallery. "You'd rather be their only one, but fair enough if you have to sort of win your place."
The intense production marks a departure for HBO, which in recent years hadn't even used its full development budget. But confronted with an urgent need for new series, HBO has hurtled into its most significant creative reboot since it began making original programs in the 1980s. In doing so, it is testing shows that represent a sharp departure from the sweeping family sagas that have defined the network most recently.
"I think we're more pregnant with talent and with ideas and with development than we've ever been in our history," said Richard Plepler, HBO's co-president. "It's not an exaggeration to say that we're as excited about the future of this place as we've been in a long time."
Part of that is a result of the performance of True Blood, the first new series that has performed strongly for HBO in quite a while. Since its premiere in September, the first five episodes of True Blood, a Southern vampire drama, have averaged about 6.5 million viewers a week, putting it on track to be HBO's third-most-watched series, after The Sopranos and Sex and the City.
Network executives are hoping that among the raft of new projects they're considering, they'll find the kind of unorthodox and compelling series that long made HBO the undisputed king of zeitgeist television.
Of course, others are vying for that crown. As FX and AMC bask in critical praise for programs such as Damages and Mad Men, HBO has spent the last few years trying to fend off the perception that it had lost its mojo.
Esoteric surfer series John From Cincinnati, the first big launch after The Sopranos concluded its run, quickly flopped. Relationship drama Tell Me You Love Me was canceled after one low-rated season, and the Lily Tomlin comedy 12 Miles of Bad Road was scuttled before it made it on the air after executives were disappointed by the early episodes. The fallow period has not appeared to affect subscriptions. Through June, the network had almost 29 million subscribers, up slightly from the same period last year, according to media research outfit SNL Kagan Research.
"Replacing a slate that was arguably at the time the best in television is very difficult to do," said Charlie Collier, AMC's general manager. "I think they're doing what all of us are trying to do, which is find the next big thing."
The unfamiliar string of misses came as HBO was undergoing an internal transition after the abrupt departure in May 2007 of its chief executive, Chris Albrecht. This year, two HBO veterans announced they were leaving as well: Entertainment President Carolyn Strauss and Film President Colin Callender.
The changes ushered in a period of introspection. Plepler and Michael Lombardo, president of the programming group, said that one of the first things they realized when they took the helm last year was how few new series HBO had in the works.
"Part of the great thing about HBO is we don't have pilot seasons, so really things can percolate until they're ready," Lombardo said. "The flip side of that is things can percolate for a very long time. What we found when we stepped into our positions was that there was a lot that was percolating, but not really ready."
So the two executives have been aggressively courting the industry, soliciting pitches -- a dramatic reversal from the way HBO conducted business in the past.
Their mission is not necessarily to find the next Sopranos, a cultural phenomenon that executives argue is impossible to replicate. Instead, they said, they're looking for the kind of distinct series that has come to define HBO.
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