Is HBO Really in ‘a Different Business’ Than the Networks?

Why can’t the networks be more like HBO?

Is it that they can’t be? Don’t want to be? Or is it something in between?

Does HBO just try harder because it makes people pay to watch, and most networks produce shows advertisers want us to watch? Whatever the reason, HBO has a quality, a luster that sets it apart.

“At HBO, we have a direct relationship with our subscribers. And so what that means is, we’re trying to provide you with programming that you choose to buy from us,” says Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the company’s chairman and chief executive. “That’s different in terms of economic motivation from a commercially supported network, because what a commercially supported network ought to do, has to do, is to provide an audience to its advertisers.”

The darling of critics, HBO has more Emmy nominations this year overall than any of its cable or network competitors--with its outstanding mob family drama “The Sopranos” the top gun with 22, followed by NBC’s White House drama “The West Wing” with 18.

But even if HBO doesn’t walk away from Sunday’s Emmy Awards with the most statues, the network has distinguished itself in series programming and made-for-TV movies that, in many ways, have set the standard for the rest of the industry. Whether it’s Tony and the boys of “The Sopranos,” the randy “chick” comedy of “Sex and the City,” Larry David’s improvised lunacy on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or the black humor and dark family drama of the surprise hit “Six Feet Under,” there’s no confusing an HBO series with something on another network.

It’s much the same in movies, where HBO has four of this year’s five Emmy nominations: “Wit,” “61*,” “For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story” and “Conspiracy.”

For years, the channel’s choices have been consistently provocative, nonconformist and/or distinctively memorable--far closer to feature films in quality than made-for-TV movies.

HBO built much of its reputation on movies and then with unique series such as “The Larry Sanders Show.” Now the network seems to be on an original-series programming roll. And the exclusives have led to a circulation boom: HBO now has some 25.5 million subscribers, a number that has grown about 1 million a year every year since 1995.

Chris Albrecht, HBO’s president for original programming, says it boils down to one simple approach: “The only thing that we’re interested in is supporting the creative vision that we’ve agreed on. So we won’t buy something if we don’t think it works for us, instead of buying something because there’s a part of it that we like and trying to change it because we think we know what will work.”

That’s a fundamental difference between HBO and the Big Four, where tinkering, meddling, watering down for the masses and competitive scheduling are, for the most part, standard operating procedure.

HBO seeks subscribers. Advertiser-supported networks seek advertisers who seek, in particular, as many 18-to 49-year-old viewers as possible.

“They’re in a different business than we are,” says NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker. “We’re all in the business of creating television hits. But what constitutes a hit on a broadcast network and a cable network are two different things.”

CBS spokesman Chris Ender agrees, adding, “They don’t have the massive amounts of shelf space to fill on a continuous basis like the broadcast networks do.” And the idea, as some have suggested, that “The Sopranos” has the rest of television running scared is, they say, an overstatement.

Albrecht doesn’t argue the point.

“Guys like [CBS, NBC and ABC entertainment chiefs] Les Moonves, Jeff Zucker and Stu Bloomberg, you know, these are smart guys,” he says. “They know what they can and can’t do.... I think they do what they do really well, and I think we’re learning to do what we do really well.”

The mistake, he says, is when the networks do come up with creatively compromised knockoffs that can only be compared unfavorably to an HBO original.

And, Albrecht says, as the number of network viewers has declined, “they’ve been able to kind of use smoke and mirrors in agreement with the advertising business that [claims their business is] not about how many people, it’s about how many people of a specific age.”

That model is breaking down, he says, which has led to an unsteady and confused approach to programming.

“When you have a creative process that is based on guessing what’s going to be popular, then you end up with a lot of people putting in their opinion.”

“Sopranos” creator and executive producer David Chase once joked that if the series had ended up on a broadcast network, “they would have given Tony Soprano a night job driving an ambulance.”

Zucker, however, doesn’t see any reason “The Sopranos,” a show he says everybody would love to have, wouldn’t work on NBC.

The show is “incredibly well written and incredibly well acted, and that’s what we do,” Zucker says. There are, of course, “some language and content issues that we would have to address, but ... it’s all about the writing and the acting, and those are the exact kind of shows we do.”

Albrecht doesn’t think so.

“It takes on a whole different tone,” says Albrecht. “You know, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead ... Taco Bell!”’

And there is already some evidence to support that contention.

When Fox Broadcasting put an edited version of HBO’s sex/fantasy comedy “Dream On” into its prime-time lineup in 1995, the series failed to translate and was yanked after less than one season.

But HBO, which continues to expand its original-series programming, should probably not be too complacent about inroads the premium cable service is making into network territory.

“I think that with the broadcast networks doing so much reality stuff, doing magazine stuff, abandoning some of what were previously franchises for them,” says Albrecht, “I think there’s an opportunity for us to maybe look into those areas and do just really great versions of shows that the audiences are familiar with.”

But perhaps there’s some bit of prophecy, enough to make the Big Four nervous, when Albrecht says: “What’s next for us is to continue to reoccupy territory that other people have abdicated ... and have it be television that’s worth paying for, as people are becoming more and more dissatisfied with the television that they’re getting for free.”

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James Endrst writes about television for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company