The Essential HBO Reader (Essential Reader Contemporary Media and Culture)
Gary R. Edgerton, Jeffrey P. Jones
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 081319248X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The founding of Home Box Office in the early 1970s was a harbinger of the innovations that transformed television as an industry and a technology in the decades that followed. HBO quickly became synonymous with subscription television and became the leading force in cable programming. Having interests in television, motion picture, and home video industries was crucial to its success. HBO diversified into original television and movie production, home video sales, and international distribution as these once-separate entertainment sectors began converging into a global entertainment industry in the mid-1980s. HBO has grown from a domestic movie channel to an international cable-and-satellite network with a presence in over seventy countries. It is now a full-service content provider with a distinctive brand of original programming and landmark shows such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City. The network is widely recognized for its award-winning, innovative and provocative programming, including dramatic series such as Six Feet Under and The Wire, miniseries such as Band of Brothers and Angels in America, comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Def Comedy Jam, sports shows such as Inside the NFL and Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, documentary series such as Taxi Cab Confessions and Autopsy, and six Oscar-winning documentaries between 1999 and 2004. In The Essential HBO Reader, editors Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones bring together an accomplished group of scholars to explain how HBO's programming transformed the world of cable television and how the network continues to shape popular culture and the television industry. Now, after more than three and a half decades, HBO has won acclaim in four distinct programming areas―drama, comedy, sports, and documentaries―emerging as TV's gold standard for its breakout series and specials. The Essential HBO Reader provides a comprehensive and compelling examination of HBO's development into the prototypical entertainment corporation of the twenty-first century.
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But I appreciate daring writers viii Acknowledgments and programming executives who are willing to produce what amounts to real-life stories and make them both compelling and heartbreaking. I also wish to thank the newest addition to my family—Andrew Campbell Jones—for reminding me of the unbridled joy life can be and of the human need for uproarious bouts of belly laughter. Finally, I am indebted to my friend and mentor Gary Edgerton for including me in this project, for his continual
with their own ideologies. Corrections officer Diane Whittlesey is a working-class single parent with a sick mother, working at Oswald because it is one of the only employers in the area with decent pay and benefits. She has compartmentalized her life and emotions in order to deal with the stresses of being a woman in a violent, masculine environment. The pressure increases when a former biker buddy of Whittlesey’s ex-husband enters Oz, and when a riot breaks out at the end of season one, she
dramatic programming. Equal parts melodramatic, political, and deeply philosophical, Tom Fontana’s series showed that HBO would not fear censorship of any kind, and that it would push the envelope in terms of scheduling, format, and most especially content. Oz broke the necessary ground for all of the dramatic series that followed, from the graphic violence of The Sopranos (1999– 2007) to the explicit language of Deadwood (2004–). At the end of the series, Augustus Hill returns from the dead to
suggested that Tanner ’88 smoothed the way for reality television.16 But it is primarily its formal innovations, rather than subject matter, that have had a lasting influence on television. Tanner ’88 was a precursor to later television shows, many on HBO, that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, comedy and drama, reality and representation. Programs such as The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), Entourage (2004–), Extras (2005–6), and The Comeback 114 Tanner
the improvisational enthusiasm of Larry David, there was another neurotic, self-absorbed “Larry”—Larry Sanders. The Larry Sanders Show lies at the forefront of HBO’s impressive string of “appointment” and “watercooler talk” groundbreaking original series. Premiering in August 1992, and running through May 1998—a total of eighty-nine thirty-minute episodes in HBO’s efficient thirteen-installment seasons, The Larry Sanders Show holds the distinction of being the first cable series to earn Emmy