Each time I interview another cable network programming
head, the conversation gets my brain abuzzin' on larger stories among
the film and television landscape. As I planned for and spoke to David Nevins
for the third interview in this series at Indiewire, I kept thinking about
Showtime in relation to HBO, much more so than I did the reverse. Showtime regularly appears to be playing catch-up with its bigger, more powerful rival.
But over the last few years, especially as the competition for (as Nevins
calls it) "premium television" has expanded well beyond the premium
cable networks, the perception of that gap has begun to feel smaller.
Homeland's first season won the Best Drama Series Emmy last
year, and if not for the rabid excitement over Breaking Bad dominating
the television firmament, I would bet on it repeating. Ray Donovan, meanwhile,
has been another huge hit for Showtime, generating viewership upwards of 5
million (across all showings and platforms) each week, which approaches Game of
Thrones and True Blood territory.
I started thinking about the evolution of these rival
networks, both among the oldest channels in the cable universe. In fact, Home Box
Office – launched in 1972 – became the first cable network with national
distribution in 1975. But Showtime? ESPN, CNN and MTV: All three were
established and appeared on cable boxes after Showtime, in 1979, 1980 and 1981
respectively. Cable systems around the country began carrying Showtime in 1978,
less than two years after its 1976 launch. That national reach was only bested
by Ted Turner who created his "superstation" WTBS (at the time a
local Atlanta station called WTCG) in Dec. 1976 by beaming it via satellite to
still evolving local cable providers.
At the time, the cable universe was small. I remember our
first cable box around 1980 had a lever that slid horizontally with numbers
going up to 13 (mimicking the VHF stations) and then switching to letters A
through Z. We didn't have 39 channels to start, but I remember all the over-the-air
stations moving to that 1-13 spectrum and cable-only networks being in the
letters. Channel 44? You're now channel 12. (As my Brady Bunch station, that
was pretty important.) Channel 36 from San Jose? Hello San Francisco; we could
now see it on channel 6. (For what it's worth, I wouldn't put money on these
lineup memories … other than KBHK-44 definitely became channel 12!)
Cable provided better reception and a guarantee of never
having to worry about your antenna. Plus, some public access stations developed
along with regional broadcasters. And then there was HBO and Showtime.
At eight years old, I certainly wasn't aware of the
difference between the two. They both showed movies that had been in theaters
not long ago. They showed them without commercials. They were unedited. R-rated
movies too, in a world where the videotape rental market was just beginning to
take shape. Nor did I know that HBO had been around longer or big contracts
dictated what movies appeared on which channels. I do remember being upset that
my dad wouldn't pay the additional fee required to have either, let alone both.
Luckily, my best friend's parents – that friend who was the first to get
everything – subscribed to both.
But original content? It wasn't a primary concern. Both
channels made the occasional attempt. HBO focused more on sports, docs and
comedy specials in the earliest days. As the '80s rolled around, HBO made a few
attempts with shows that I vividly recalled, but only after being reminded of
them. During the decade of Reagan, Fraggle Rock and 1st
& Ten (which couldn't be more different!) came to mind while I had (almost embarrassingly) forgotten
about Not Necessarily the News and The Hitchhiker. I paid
more attention to HBO series in the '90s, and with the exception of Tales
from the Crypt, the channel really began to focus on comedy: The
Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, Dream On, Tracey
Takes On … and Arli$$.
Of course, more than anything, it was The Larry Sanders Show that
really got people's attention. Larry Sanders (which premiered in
1992) managed to do what seemed impossible: capture the pop culture zeitgeist
at the precise moment it happened, rather than even a millisecond late. Late
night talk shows dominated the pop culture conversation as Johnny Carson was
about to retire, the battle for The Tonight Show had become a nearly
mythic tale soon to be documented in both book and film form, and the writing
was just so damn smart. Larry Sanders was the first scripted
narrative show to not depend on its ability to utilize adult language and nudity
as its prime argument for skipping something on the broadcast nets and
switching to HBO.
In a way, HBO's development (and Showtime's) is not so different from that of a
person's. During its first decade, it struggled to learn and grow and find an
identity. By the '90s, it was like an adolescent boy, looking to laugh at
everything, not always taking much seriously, enjoying as many naked breasts
and as much swearing in public as necessary, but eventually starting to
diversify, expressing more thoughtful ideas and becoming more serious. Larry
Sanders was like graduating from high school and entering
college where more serious subject matter would take hold.
The adult the "HBO" would eventually become was
formed in those next years, and specifically, in the period ranging from the
1997 premiere of Oz through the first season of The Wire in 2002. Arguably,
these five years saw the development of the solar system that is this
"Third Golden Age of Television. As I discussed a two weeks ago, those
years simultaneously marked the gentle decline of the '90s indie film explosion
and the premieres of The Sopranos and Six
Feet Under along with the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon,
The
Corner (without which, The Wire wouldn't have happened) and
Band
of Brothers.
Sex and the City arrived during this period too and became the
channel's most popular comedy to date, but this shift towards hourlong adult
dramas that could take more risks and push acceptable forms of storytelling is
what led to the current TV landscape. These HBO series (as well as FX's The Shield,
which premiered in 2002) likely never would have happened if not for some of
the more daring series on broadcast networks, most notably ABC's NYPD
Blue and NBC's Homicide: Life on the Streets. But
it was the emergence of HBO and their having more than one series to tout in a
year that began to cause a shift in all those people who previously proudly
claimed to neither watch nor even own a TV. Now, they were finding friends with
HBO in order to watch The Sopranos and The
Wire. It was those big-studio hating, indie film loving, TV-is-junk
spouting audiences who gave credence to HBO's slogan: "It's not TV. It's
HBO," a marketing slogan continuously used from 1996 until just four years
ago when suddenly TV had become cool and the channel no longer had any need to
distance itself from the medium.
Meanwhile, what was Showtime doing? Showtime which had
always seemed one step behind, but mostly due to having started a few years
later. Showtime wasn't being held back in school; it just was still in sixth
grade as HBO had moved on to high school.
Showtime spent the '80s periodically dipping its toe into
the original programming waters. Showtime dabbled with original content
throughout the ''80s, primarily focused on comedy arguably more-so than HBO.
The only drama attempt that decade was its 1983 revival of the series version
of The
Paper Chase, which CBS had cancelled after its first season in 1979.
Showtime made three more seasons of the show. But otherwise, the half-dozen or
so non-stand-up comedy series from the '80s were mostly unmemorable, with the
notable exception of It's Garry Shandling's Show, the
titular comedian's pre-Larry Sanders meta-sitcom; and Super
Dave, a sketch comedy series starring Super Dave Osborne, the alter-ego
of comedian Bob Einstein (who, of course, is the brother of Albert Einstein,
better known to most as the Albert
Brooks – who is brilliant but in quite a different way than the Albert Einstein … but I digress).
The separation between channels really occurred in the '90s,
however, as HBO started making more dramatic advances in programming and
Showtime's strategy frequently seemed like a response or reaction to HBO rather
than any attempt to create a strong, dynamic identity of its own.
By the mid-90s, series weren't making HBO a must-have for
cable subscribers; feature-length original movies were HBO's bread-and-butter.
And in 1994, Showtime began a big push in original feature programming as well.
From 1994-1997, in fact, the channel aired nearly 80 movies under the Showtime
Original Pictures banner. Showtime's aggressive entry was partly due to
necessity: Upstart premium network Starz had come along and secured a deal for
Disney's theatrical output beginning in 1994, a huge chunk of Showtime's programming
inventory. Still, making there own movies was something Showtime had done
infrequently to date and with middling success.
This endeavor certainly didn't help Showtime's growth,
especially in comparison to its rival. Showtime received a few Emmy nominations
and even won some ACE Awards during this period, but 1993 marked the beginning
of HBO dominance as the channel won the Emmy Award for "Outstanding Movie
Made for Television" each year for the rest of the decade, and all but
three times since then. (The category was retired after the 2010 Emmys and
merged to become "Outstanding Miniseries or Movie.")
Showtime stopped making movies altogether nearly 10 years
ago, airing it's last Showtime Original Picture in 2005, and as I discovered
during my conversation with Nevins, they aren't likely to return to that trough
any time soon. He seemed mostly uninterested, stating that in the current
landscape, "considering the amount of money required to make and market [original
feature-length movies], I'd rather just keep adding series. "
A greater focus on series arrived in the mid-'90s along with
the push into original movies, similarly due to the need to generate more
content due to the potential lack of theatrical film inventory. Already having
not gained too much traction with comedy and rather than compete with HBO's
reasonable success in that area, especially post-Larry Sanders, they
decided to focus on hour-long shows and genre entertainment, particularly
sci-fi. Showtime revived the '60s series The Outer Limits in 1995, followed
by a spin-off of the Poltergeist movies – Poltergeist: The Legacy – beginning
in 1996. The achieved some success with Stargate SG-1, which premiered in
1997 and ran for five seasons before continuing its decade-long run on The
SciFi Channel in 2002. But their next attempt – Total Recall 2070 –
lasted just one season.
But none of these shows did much to challenge the television
status-quo. They were niche entertainments that developed some devoted fanboy
following, but certainly weren't enough to encourage large swaths of cable
households to shell-out more money to become subscribers. Showtime obviously
was not blind to this reality, and then in 2000, after HBO began its shift
towards hourlong dramas, receiving notice for Oz and breaking out with The
Sopranos, Showtime launched Queer as Folk.
Queer as Folk may have simple maintained the niche-audience reality
of Showtime (albeit, a different niche). It never became a huge hit, but it
certainly marked a turning-point in series programming for the channel. In a
way, it became Showtime's Larry Sanders: a series that
couldn't appear on broadcast network television and was daring to tell
complicated and smart stories; a series that was going to tap into something in
the modern zeitgeist – in this case, stories focusing on homosexual folk that
were about them as people who are gay as opposed to people being gay. But it's
proximity to the beginning of The Sopranos also elicited
comparisons to between the two, once that weren't necessarily fair are
certainly not applicable. The Sopranos was a game-changer in
character and storytelling while Queer as Folk a) wasn't and b) was
too easily labeled "the gay show," even though that second point
certainly made it important and unique, and helped pave the way for the
emergence of channels like Here TV and Logo TV.
Showtime continued trying to make a mark in original series.
Arguably, they were primed to, just as Larry Sanders helped fertilize the
environment for Oz, The Sopranos, Sex and the City and beyond. But
shows like Resurrection Blvd. and Leap Years didn't catch-on. They
returned to their sci-fi comfort zone
with Odyssey
5 and Jeremiah, and the latter garnered an enthusiastic fanbase, but
again not enough to really boost subscriber rates. The rest of their attempts
in the early 2000s each had their supporters but felt completely incohesive in
terms of further establishing a Showtime brand. (Personally, I was a big fan of
the dark fantasy dramedy Dead Like Me, but I was
less-than-surprised that it only lasted two seasons.)
In January of 2004 when The L Word premiered, garnering a
mixed reception from critics but a dedicated following of fans, especially
those who wanted more than just Queer as Folk. And still, it was unclear what Showtime wanted
to be. They didn't want to be The SciFi Channel. Nor did they want to be solely
a network featuring gay-themed programming? The combination of the two didn't
really make much sense either.
Then came Robert Greenblatt, who became President of
Entertainment in 2003. Greenblatt had developed many of Fox's most successful
shows like Beverly Hills, 90210, The X-Files and Party of Five, as well as
executive produced HBO's Six Feet Under. If Queer
as Folk and The L Word helped bookend the channel's college years – exploring
itself and trying to determine how to communicate with the world – Greenblatt
brought the channel into its grad school and let it towards its professional
phase.
Greenblatt's first series buy was Huff, which starred Hank
Azaria as a mid-life therapist dealing with his own personal and familial issues
and crises. Huff was Showtime's Oz. It wasn't the breakthrough hit
Showtime wanted out of the box, but it still marked a noticeable change for the
channel, in character-driven, adult-themed stories that were not only unlike
what one might see on the broadcast networks but also unlike HBO.
As HBO hourlong dramas continued to push boundaries,
Showtime under Greenblatt probably made its biggest mark complementing its
rival with strong half-hour comedies. Weeds, Nurse Jackie and The
Big C all proved extremely valuable for the channel, especially as they
each focused on a strong female central character audiences had a difficult
time finding elsewhere in TV land.
And then there was Dexter, a hit for sure, and at times
one of the strongest shows on television. (Other times, far from it. I'm
looking at you season three; and apparently this final season too, which I
haven't seen.) Dexter helped create a space for hour-long dramas again, one
that felt more competitive with the rest of the TV universe, even if it still
wasn't going to challenge the ratings numbers of HBO's biggest boys. But more
importantly, it was based around a unique character living in and reacting to
an odd world. The DNA of Dexter – even with its extreme
violence and subject matter – maintains a sense of play, and fits in quite
nicely with its sisters Weeds, Nurse Jackie and The
Big C, not to mention Californication, and even the other successful
dramas that followed such as The Tudors and The Borgias.
Now we've seen Showtime take another turn, with another
growth spurt. In 2010, Greenblatt left to take over NBC, and he was replaced by
Nevins. Once again, the new series possess a slightly different tone and
sensibility. Nevins said as much, claiming to have a "slightly different
sensibility." He described looking for things with a "multiple points
of view," something that I think is quite evident when comparing the
series from the Greenblatt era with what we've seen so far in these early Nevins
years.
That DNA connecting Weeds, Nurse Jackie and Dexter
has mutated just a bit when looking at Homeland or Ray Donovan. The former –
and most of the other Greenblatt shows – rely heavily on a singular strong
character. They all succeed because there are other dynamic, interesting
characters influencing our "hero" (or anti-hero), but that main
character remains the central and primary focus and we see the world through
him and her. That's less the case in these newer series. Certainly in Homeland,
the series is very much split between the points-of-view of Carrie (Claire
Danes) and Brody (Damian Lewis). Ray Donovan may be named after our
central character, and he certainly does a great deal of the heavy lifting, but
the series – especially as it continues – seems constructed much more like The
Sopranos; Tony Soprano was a towering figure in it, but the totality of
the show always was more about the world he inhabited and his impact on that
world rather than the other way around.
Nevins seems to have helped Showtime move from those grad
school/first job years into the established pro realm. Showtime has truly
grown-up and established itself. As Nevins told me when discussing Homeland's
breakout first season and Emmy win, " We're really playing in the big
leagues." HBO may still lead the overall pack, but now, Showtime can
steal the spotlight on Emmy night and even reach similar popularity levels with
their shows.
The rivalry between HBO and Showtime seems like it's real
once more. HBO still has far more successes in its trophy case, but Showtime
feels as if it has reached caught-up to where HBO was just a few years ago in
terms of combining audience and critical acceptance to a point where both
groups expect a certain standard. And with the gap shrinking between the
quality of programming on other networks and longtime HBO-dominance, I am
certainly curious to see where how the long history of these two channels
continues to progress. The amount that could change over even the next five
years seems staggering.
Out of Focus 