A major reboot at HBO
After 'The Sopranos,' 'Sex and the City' and 'Six Feet Under,' the cable network hit a lull. So new executives have put development into high gear, greenlighting nine pilots.
Reporting from New York — When Alan Taylor is directing your HBO television pilot, it's usually a sign the program is a lock to get on the air. The Emmy-award winning director has put his imprint on nearly every one of the network's major series, including "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City," "Six Feet Under," “Big Love” and "Deadwood."
But Taylor's latest HBO project, "Bored to Death," is up against stiffer competition than usual. Penned by novelist Jonathan Ames, the quirky comedy about a frustrated young New York writer who moonlights as a hard-boiled detective is just one of nine pilots HBO currently has in the works. Dozens of other shows from the likes of actor Jim Carrey, author Tom Wolfe and "The Squid and the Whale" screenwriter Noah Baumbach are in various stages of development.
"It will be a survival of what they consider the fittest," Taylor said on a recent cold fall night, as he prepared to shoot a scene in a brightly lit TriBeCa art gallery. "You'd rather be their only one, but fair enough, if you have to sort of win your place."
The intensive production marks a departure for the premium cable channel, which in recent years hadn't even used its full development budget. But confronted with an urgent need for new series, HBO has hurtled into its most significant creative reboot since it began making original programs in the 1980s. In doing so, it's testing shows that represent a sharp departure from the sweeping family sagas that have most recently defined the network.
"I think we're more pregnant with talent and with ideas and with development than we've ever been in our history," said Richard Plepler, HBO's co-president. "It's not an exaggeration to say that we're as excited about the future of this place as we've been in a long time."
Part of that is due to the performance of “True Blood,” the first new series that has performed strongly for HBO in quite a while. Since its premiere in September, the first five episodes of the Southern vampire drama have averaged about 6.5 million viewers across a week, putting it on track to be HBO's third-most-watched series, after "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City."
Network executives are now hoping that among the raft of new projects they're considering, they'll find the kind of unorthodox and compelling series that long made HBO the undisputed king of zeitgeist television.
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