It's Not TV

Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era

Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, Cara Louise Buckley, Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, Cara Louise Buckley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135902735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la televisión

Since first going on the air in 1972, HBO has continually attempted to redefine television as we know it. Today, pay television (and HBO in particular) is positioned as an alternative to network offerings, consistently regarded as the premier site for what has come to be called "quality television."

This collection of new essays by an international group of media scholars argues that HBO, as part of the leading edge of television, is at the center of television studies' interests in market positioning, style, content, technology, and political economy. The contributors focus on pioneering areas of analysis and new critical approaches in television studies today, highlighting unique aspects of the "HBO effect" to explore new perspectives on contemporary television from radical changes in technology to dramatic shifts in viewing habits.

It's Not TV provides fresh insights into the "post-television network" by examining HBO's phenomenally popular and pioneering shows, including The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City as well as its failed series, such as K Street and The Comeback. The contributors also explore the production process itself and the creation of a brand commodity, along with HBO's place as a market leader and technological innovator.

Contributors: Kim Akass, Cara Louise Buckley, Rhiannon Bury, Joanna L. Di Mattia, Blake D. Ethridge, Tony Kelso, Marc Leverette, David Marc, Janet McCabe, Conor McGrath, Shawn McIntosh, Brian L. Ott, Avi Santo, Lisa Williamson

Foreword by Toby Miller

Marc Leverette is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Colorado State University. He is author of Professional Wrestling, the Myth, the Mat, and American Popular Culture and co-editor of Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead and Oh My God, They Deconstructed South Park! Those Bastards!

Brian L. Ott is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Colorado State University. He is author of The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age.

Cara Louise Buckley is a lecturer at Emerson College.

Part I
Industry and economics

Introduction: The not TV industry

Marc Leverette

A specter haunts television studies—the specter of the media industries.

Within this specter loom other spirits as well. They go by many names: branding, political economy, globalization, production, and so on. And these ghosts have been called out by name for very explicit reasons in this section in its examination of HBO from a largely institutional and economic perspective. And so these spirits will be our guide in this section as the following four chapters each ostensibly ask: “If HBO is not TV, then how does HBO relate to the television industry?”

Part of HBO’s success in the television industry is due in large part to how it defines and, perhaps more importantly, brands itself. And while many of the chapters in this book—not merely this section—challenge HBO’s claim as to whether or not it’s actually “TV,” it is hard to deny that a key to good branding is, of course, a slogan. And while HBO’s “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.” is a statement that gets thoroughly deconstructed throughout here, it wasn’t always how HBO saw itself. For example, HBO, since its inception has had no less than 11 different catchphrases to help people remember the place of Home Box Office in their lives. From 1972 to 1978 it was “Different and First.” Then came “The Home Box,” which was used until 1982. The 1982–1983 season briefly heard the slogan “Start with Us on HBO.” “There’s No Place Like HBO” stuck around for two years, getting replaced in 1986 with “Let’s All Get Together,” which—somehow—managed to last until 1988. “Watch Us Here on HBO” wasn’t very popular either, getting replaced in 1989–1990 with “Simply the Best,” one of their more elaborate image campaigns constructed around the Tina Turner hit of the same name. Both 1992 and 1993 were privy to “We’re HBO,” elegant in its brevity. Beyond the understanding of this author (who was not a media critic at the time nor an HBO consumer) is how “We’re Out of Town Today” managed to be the central branding slogan for four years. However, the HBO that has come to be central in today’s cultural zeitgeist, the post-Sopranos HBO that opens all its shows with that familiar click of static with the logo coming quickly into focus, has been all about the two sentences from which the title of this book is hijacked. In addition to “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO,” in 2006, the website began confronting viewers with the phrase “Get More,” in addition to the former, more familiar slogan.

Avi Santo’s chapter “Para-Television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO,” seemingly takes up that last motto by way of considering whether or not HBO is offering us a chance or an ultimatum, though an investigation of how HBO’s culture of production has “contributed to a series of programming and marketing strategies that position the channel (and its subscribers) in a complex and often contradictory relationship with the rest of the television universe.” As Santo observes, HBO’s efforts to brand itself in opposition to the rest of television contradict some of the basic operating principles upon which the pay network relies in order to remain profitable. Santo sees HBO executives as having seemingly bought into the pay station’s own rhetoric, thus creating a work culture that, at times, appears at odds with HBO’s own long-range profitability and sustainability.

Modern theories of political economy illuminate a capitalist society where profit is the absolute truth and those in control preach auspiciously from within the system. The problem is “classically” identified by Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) as an illusion of choice, where culture is being “engulfed by an insatiable uniformity,” charging that “culture today is infecting everything with sameness.” This illusion manifests itself across the spectrum of our cultural commodities. Our media is always and already infected, with everything going to the bottom line. For many interested in the media industries and their ideological and economic ramifications, effort to stress a connection among economics, society, and culture illustrates the necessity to critically evaluate the industry. Commenting on the importance of political economy, Ben Bagdikian (2004) argues that the quest for profit maximization has created a situation of deregulation, conglomeration, and integration, which the corporate giants—giants such as Time Warner, HBO’s parent company—have taken advantage of in order to dominate the market. For media scholars, the theories of political economy are important because they deal directly with the production and consumption of our culture, which at the moment is dominated by the undeniable structures of capitalism.

This problematic relationship with risk/creativity and success/profit in the media industries is at the heart of Tony Kelso’s chapter. As Kelso and his political economy perspective are quick to show, when it comes to creating commercial network programming, one implicit rule is clear: avoid risk (resulting in the “sameness” Horkheimer and Adorno so disdained). Television executives often feel pressure to provide an “advertising-friendly” environment that, while building ratings, does not threaten revenue by alienating sponsors. Yet because HBO relies on viewer subscriptions, it must separate itself from commercial stations and, consequently, take chances. As such, Kelso examines some of HBO’s recent, innovative content to establish this theme and argues that the network demonstrates greater respect for its audience than advertising-supported channels by more often giving viewers not what they are willing to watch, but what they want to watch.

Shawn McIntosh takes this question a clear step further—at least in geographic terms—as he asks, “Will Yingshuiji Buzz Help HBO Asia?” Concerned with what the network’s expansion and various partnerships overseas provide, McIntosh finds that a look at HBO Asia offers an interesting window into how HBO may change its business practices in the future. McIntosh attempts to frame HBO within the global marketplace, a complex system that is not at first easily definable. Globalization is a large concept with many different inroads. A hotly debated notion, it has become the buzzword in contemporary discourse. McIntosh uses a definition provided by David Held and Anthony McGrew (2003:4) that’s as good as any:

Simply put, globalization denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of social interaction. It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across the world’s major regions and continents.

In examining how HBO Asia positions itself within the Asian market, McIntosh discusses both implications for HBO as a whole and what the HBO brand means within the Asian media market—a market radically different from its European and North and South American counterparts. Whereas Kelso uses political economy as a starting point for tracking HBO programming decisions, McIntosh here eschews generalized political economy assumptions and offers a nuanced look at how a modern transnational media entertainment company such as HBO negotiates new (global) markets and how that very interaction may not only change the markets it enters, but the practices and assumptions of the company itself.

The final chapter in this section, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass’s “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming: Producing Quality TV,” links these broad-ranging industry-based questions with the recent aesthetic and content-based turn in television studies. Thus their chapter aims to situate HBO’s original programming within the current “Quality TV” debate, a debate McCabe and Akass are at the center of (forthcoming). With this contribution, McCabe and Akass suggest how HBO emerged as an aggressive market leader at the moment when the landscape of contemporary US television was itself changing through an assessment of how HBO instituted a policy of original programming, building as it did its groundbreaking reputation on notions of “quality” based on branding, cost, and innovation as it sought to find a place for itself in an overcrowded television landscape/marketplace. Additionally, McCabe and Akass look at what impact this business strategy had on the formal style and content of original programming, what we could call the HBO effect. By focusing on the promotion of the author, aesthetic and formal innovations, and controversy, they explore how notions of quality were used and asserted to do different work, to boldly go where the networks and other cable channels (until recently) feared to tread, offering the suggestion that it is no accident that a renewed academic interest in TV coincides with the rise to prominence of HBO. For McCabe and Akass, the polemic debate is now between the “quality” of HBO (that it’s not regular TV) and the popularity of network television, in addition to the struggle between good (expensive) TV (eg The Sopranos) and bad (cheap) TV (eg reality TV, makeover shows, etc); the existence of this polemic (good/bad; quality/popular) is at the heart of discussions—be they academic, critical or popular—defining contemporary U.S. television.

What these four chapters offer then are snapshots of a particular company that exists in a particular time and place. As these chapters show, when we start to look at HBO outside of this particular time, and place things outside of the snapshots’ frame, and unravel, things change, and things get further complicated. But these chapters are written knowing full well that these complications are the object of critical media studies. In a globalized world where corporate branding, programming, and production all exist within a complex network of synergistic ebbs and flows, television studies must fully recognize the ghost that is always at our backs. What these chapters argue for is a better understanding of the ways in which HBO operates and the system in which it both is and is not TV. HBO is interested in these contours for economic reasons; the authors in this section illustrate that the media industries and the systemic interests that reify global, neoliberal capital have, as Marx and Engels would say, “a world to win.” For scholars, that world is ours to understand.

Media critics of all countries, unite!

Works cited

Bagdikian, B. (2004) The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon.

Held, D. & McGrew, A. (2003) “The Great Globalization Debate: An Introduction”, pp 1–49 in D. Held & A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Cambridge: Polity.

Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (1972) “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, pp 120–167 in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming. New York: Continuum.

McCabe, J. & Akass, K. (eds) (forthcoming) Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: IB Tauris.

Chapter 1
Para-television and discourses of distinction

The culture of production at HBO

Avi Santo

HBO’s recent success is often credited to the innovativeness of its programming and the effectiveness of its advertising. This claim has generated a slew of articles, both academic and journalistic, debating whether or not HBO is TV in the traditional sense. Despite the difficulty many scholars and commentators have in identifying what television in the post-network era is, they nevertheless have highlighted “qualitative” differences between pay cable and standard broadcast fare. Yet, very little commentary has directly addressed either the historical development of original programming on HBO in relation to broadcast television or explored how HBO’s unique culture of production has contributed to a series of programming and marketing strategies that position the channel (and its subscribers) in a complex and often contradictory relationship with the rest of the television universe.

It largely has been assumed that the deregulated and advertiser-free space pay cable occupies is sufficient to explain differences in content, form, and practice between HBO and network television. In contrast, I contend that HBO’s historical position within the televisual landscape has produced a set of institutional imperatives and tensions that have greatly contributed to the types of programming it produces and the marketing campaigns it runs. Among these are HBO’s requirements continuously to attract new subscribers while keeping churn to a minimum and its need to distinguish its product from standard network fare while simultaneously looking to broadcast and cable networks as sites for future syndication and production deals. The end result for HBO is neither television in the traditional network era sense of the word (not that anything produced in the post-network landscape truly is) nor “not television,” but, as I will demonstrate, the production of para-television, which purposely relies on mimicking and tweaking existing and recognizable TV forms.

Furthermore, I argue that HBO’s efforts to distinguish itself from standard broadcast television are indicative of what the pay network believes it is selling to subscribers. On a fairly simple level, pay cable must appear to offer something that subscribers cannot get either on free TV (the networks) or for the price of basic cable, and which viewers believe is superior to those cheaper alternatives. Thus, HBO must continuously promote discourses of “quality” and “exclusivity” as central to the subscription experience. These discourses aim to brand not only HBO, but its audience as well. In this manner, pay cable sells cultural capital to its subscribers, who are elevated above the riffraff that merely consume television, a medium long derided as base and feminizing in its unabashed embrace of consumerism. Thus, HBO has formulated a notion of what subscribers are paying for that often conflicts with its own institutional imperatives. “Quality” implies a distinction from network programming that is neither fully attainable nor desirable given HBO’s historical reliance upon network television as an ancillary market and programming inspiration. “Exclusivity” implies a limiting of access that conflicts with HBO’s stated desire to attract as many subscribers as possible. This contributes further to the institutional tensions that impact HBO programming and marketing, since assumptions about what subscribers are seeking conflicts with the pay network’s continuous need to seek out new markets and develop closer ties with the broadcast networks.

Finally, I argue that HBO’s efforts to brand itself in opposition to the rest of television not only contradict some of the basic operating principles upon which the pay network relies in order to remain profitable, but that HBO has seemingly bought into its own rhetorical position to such an extent that it has created a work culture that, at times, appears at odds with its own long-range profitability and sustainability. In other words, it is not simply that HBO’s marketing strategy emphasizing its non-televisuality is misleading when examined with close regard to the pay channel’s historical relationship to the rest of television, but that HBO has absorbed the cultural values it believes subscribers are seeking into its own culture of production, even to the detriment of its supposed economic bottom line. In this sense, cultural values inform economic decisions as much as they are shaped by them, complicating traditional political economy arguments that reduce culture down to its means of production and see economics determining such processes in every instance. Certainly, HBO’s programming and marketing strategies are intended to serve a profit-generating purpose, but they are also informed by the particular cultural values HBO seeks to brand itself by, which, in turn, intersect and interfere with the pay channel’s financial goals.

I will begin this essay by tracing briefly the historical emergence of original programming on HBO. I will discuss the key regulatory, industrial, and technological shifts that have influenced HBO’s foray into the production of para-television. I then will analyze the particular institutional imperatives and tensions HBO faces and how these are negotiated through its programming and marketing choices. I will end by discussing how the cultural values HBO seeks to brand itself by have been incorporated into the cultural philosophy of the pay channel, and have, in turn, led to programming and marketing strategies that run counter to HBO’s economic goals.

Leading up to originality

HBO was launched in November 1972 as a small pay movie channel available as part of the Time Inc. cable package. The pay channel’...