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The premium cable channel HBO is really an amazing institution.
Think of it: during just the last six years, it has created The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Ali G – a couple of the best dramatic series, one of the funniest sitcoms and the best reality show in television history. And, also, what I think is the best western ever, called Deadwood .
And whether or not people in 1876 on the frontier actually cursed this way, the dialogue is unlike anything we've ever heard before, Mark Twain meets Edith Wharton meets David Mamet.
Deadwood just received 11 Emmy Award nominations – and HBO got 93 nominations in all.
And in just a few weeks they start airing Rome , a lavish 12 part series set in ancient Rome in 52 B.C.
Judging from the first episode, which I watched, it will be the smartest, classiest sword-and-sandals epic ever made.
And by making great television, by doing good, HBO also does very well: it has profits of more than a billion dollars a year, more than any other TV network on earth.
So there's been some schadenfreude lately, as news stories have appeared noting that HBO's primetime audiences shrunk 29% during the last few years.
Now the people who run HBO say they don't really care. Because the channel doesn't sell advertising, their business doesn't depend on ratings. As long as 28 million of us pay our HBO bills every month, it doesn't matter how many of us watch the shows.
In any case, instead of schadenfreude, the better German emotion we ought to feel on their behalf is what my German-speaking friend Guy says is groszügigkeit, or generosity of spirit. It's important that HBO continue to succeed, because its business model – making huge profits based on a real devotion to excellence -- is so good for the culture.
Think of it: we now expect any new HBO series to be very good, at least, or sometimes even great. That has never happened before in American television.
36 years ago, PBS was created with the grandest intentions. And PBS still broadcasts a few essential shows – The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer chief among them.
But these days pretty much every serious, original TV movie about history or current events is produced by HBO. PBS, on the other hand, airs...Antiques Roadshow. And the corporate underwriting spots on PBS look to me a lot more like advertisements than anything I see on HBO.
In fact, it seems to me that as a creator of programming, it's HBO that has fulfilled that original public TV dream –it costs $12 or $15 a month to subscribe, but it has become America's great advertising-free oasis of smart, enlightened, innovative, risk-taking television.
I'm Kurt Andersen. You've been listening today to Studio 360. I really hope you'll join us again for next week's show.
Based on a column published in New York Magazine, June 15, 2005
