Casey Bloys, the chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content, and his team have delivered Succession, Euphoria, The Last of Us, The White Lotus, Mare of Easttown, and House of the Dragon, so you could argue that they know exactly what they’re doing. Part of HBO’s appeal has always been that it’s selective about what it makes. The buyers are obviously not having the time of their lives either. “I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve never been in a situation where people are like, ‘Oh, no one’s buying anything right now.’ We just can’t sell.” “People are just desperate,” says David H. All the while, the threat of a writers strike has hovered overhead (it began on May 2), slowing production even further. Discovery, and others have laid off thousands of staffers, pulled the plug on underperforming programming, and vowed to be more cautious. Wall Street, unsurprisingly, is second-guessing the throw-everything-at-the-wall mentality that fueled the streaming arms race. But that’s declined since Netflix’s loss of subscribers caused the company’s market cap to dip $54 billion last year, and Disney, NBCUniversal, and Paramount collectively accumulated more than $8.3 billion in streaming losses. The streamers’ appetite for originality and niche programming was once their chief selling point, apart from us not having to go outside. “There were a couple of instances of driving people to LAX and dropping them off while a billboard for Handmaid’s was staring down at me,” he says.Īnd that was the golden age. Or overheard, to be more accurate: They were talking to each other in the back of his Lyft. The good news was that he still heard some solid gossip from Hollywood insiders. Back in 2017, around the time that The Handmaid’s Tale emerged as a global hit for Hulu and became the first streaming show ever to win the top drama Emmy, one of its writers, John Herrera, was working a second job. The golden age of streaming didn’t always reward the people who actually mined the gold.
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