A friend to writers at HBO

PRIOR to last week, when she was tapped as the new chief of HBO Entertainment, Sue Naegle had spent her entire career as an agent representing television writers. So this is a person who knows how the network process works, understands the ways in which proposed shows are too frequently popped into the broiler as raw filet mignon and somehow, many kitchen arguments later, slide out as blackened ground chuck.

"My biggest heartbreak as an agent was, I'd work with my clients and hear what they wanted to do and really get excited and really love it, take it into the network [or] wherever it was going, and then watch it slowly die, by a thousand people with different opinions," Naegle told me with a rueful chuckle last week. "By the end of it, people couldn't remember what they'd started with."

HBO was, for much of the last decade, the great counter-example proving that TV series could be created differently, using methods more favorable to passionate writer-producers, the people who dreamed up what became "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under" or "Sex and the City." And Naegle left no doubt she'd like to make the pay-cable outlet every writer's dream destination once more.

"Development by committee or by patching together multiple people's ideas isn't the way to get great television," she said. "I think it starts with the writer. Somebody who's very passionate and has a clear idea about what they'd like to do and the kind of show they'd like to produce. When I hear that and see that in somebody's eyes, I always feel like I've got something."

Whether HBO can maintain its commitment to great television in a rapidly changing media environment is, of course, the big question surrounding Naegle's hire, which was announced last week. She replaces Carolyn Strauss, a career-long HBO programmer nudged from the post last month.

The last few seasons have seen lots of high-profile disappointments for HBO. Not many fans lined up for quixotic campaigns to save the willfully perverse drama "John From Cincinnati," for example, or Louis C.K.'s misbegotten sitcom "Lucky Louie." In fact, subscribers and critics alike have seemed puzzled by much of what HBO's done recently.

"Interesting, smart, entertaining series" are what Michael Lombardo, Naegle's new boss and the channel's West Coast chief, said HBO now must find.