IN THE EARLY 1970s Sterling Manhattan Cable, a television company in New York, was beset by high costs and low take-up. Charles Dolan, the chief executive, had to come up with a solution fast. He proposed a subscription television service, one which would allow viewers to enjoy recent films at home without disruptive advertising breaks and jarring cuts. The result, Home Box Office (HBO), launched 50 years ago, in November 1972.
As a premium cable offering, HBO was not subject to the same government regulations on content that affected broadcast television. Elsewhere viewers were not “getting a film”, says Jeffrey Jones, executive director of the Peabody awards, so much as “a tv presentation of a film with breaks and sex scenes and language censored”. HBO subscribers could watch movies “unfettered”, with all the smut, swearing and violence left in.
Sex sells, as does sport: Mr Dolan and HBO’s executives understood fans’ loyalty could be harnessed. HBO’s inaugural broadcast on November 8th 1972 was a National Hockey League match; in 1975 HBO became the first television network to deliver a continuous signal via satellite with its broadcast of the “Thrilla in Manila” boxing fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
As HBO expanded across America, a kind of mythology developed around the company. Bill Mesce, who joined HBO in 1982, recalls that his colleagues would tell (perhaps apocryphal) stories about adults chasing their trucks down the street like youngsters after an ice-cream van. But the mystique was pierced in the mid-1980s, when video-hire shops such as Blockbuster entered the market. As Americans could now watch any film they wanted, whenever they wanted, the company had to change tack. HBO started to develop its own original series.
The company’s business model—attracting subscribers rather than advertisers—allowed commissioners to pursue experimental or daring series. Stories did not have to fit specific slots and generic expectations; narrative was liberated from the constraints of ad breaks. Chris Albrecht, responsible for original programming in the 1990s, had joined HBO from ICM, a talent agency. The likes of Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg were persuaded to work on the small screen; Mr Albrecht has said that bringing in silver-screen stars was crucial to hbo’s success.
Early shows such as “Oz”, a prison drama, won acclaim, but it was “The Sopranos” (pictured), a drama about an introspective mob boss, which “put HBO in a different category”, says Mr Mesce. “The Sopranos” was “hailed as putting something out there in the tv landscape that people had never seen. There had not been a viable gangster television show prior to that,” explains Deborah Jaramillo of Boston University. It demonstrated that viewers could love antiheroes, and paved the way for Don Draper in “Mad Men” and Walter White in “Breaking Bad”.
hbo shows have continued to earn accolades—since 1988 hbo has won 719 Emmy awards—and set trends around the world. (The company readily proclaims its own excellence: its most famous slogan, used between 1996 and 2009, was “it’s not tv, it’s HBO”.) “Sex and the City” offered an unabashed depiction of female sexuality. “The Wire” reinvigorated the crime genre. “Game of Thrones”, hbo’s biggest-ever show, turned television fantasy into a phenomenon. “The Rings of Power”, a new addition to the “Lord of the Rings” franchise produced by Amazon, hopes to draw on its appeal.
Above all, HBO has changed viewers’ expectations of production values on television, both in America and internationally. In 2020 it launched a new streaming service, HBO Max, which is now available in 61 countries worldwide. (HBO is owned by WarnerMedia, which recently merged with Discovery.) Having focused on quality over quantity, HBO may have to appease viewers who expect both and will gleefully binge a season in a weekend. Doing that without diminishing the output is not easy.
Yet HBO can celebrate its 50th birthday on November 8th with confidence. Its current hit—“House of the Dragon”, a “Games of Thrones” prequel—was its most-watched series premiere ever, with nearly 10m viewers on its debut night. The show is now averaging 29m viewers per episode in America, more than triple the number that tuned in for the first season of “Game of Thrones”. If HBO can maintain its reputation for first-rate storytelling, as well as its knack for adaptation to the market, it may well enjoy another half-century of success.
