Hello World

As someone about to cancel HBO (since my 6 months of cheapness runs out next month), this story in Good Magazine was of especial interest to me.

“I think that when your sole goal is to be good,” Strauss says, “when everyone who’s working there has that frame of reference, then, right away, you’re dealing with something special. That may be a little bit different than when your goal is to sell ad time, or drive up ratings—not that ratings aren’t important to us, they are important to us—but we live in a world where what we’re selling is HBO.” In other words, HBO is selling quality; and to sell it, it has to achieve it.

Amazingly, HBO gets its quality points even if no one is watching. HBO’s single most critically acclaimed series is not The Sopranos, but The Wire, which gets a fraction of the ratings of the mob drama. David Baldwin, HBO’s executive VP of program planning, breaks it down: “We don’t have to have mass, broad audience hits. Because I have one segment of my audience base that do think [The Wire] is absolutely brilliant, and will not miss it, and that’s a large part of their faith in HBO: that we could make something like this—the story of why urban America is failing—that no one else would touch.”

Worth a read.

[via Fimoculous]