There was a time, not all that long ago when the name HBO was synonymous with top-tier television.
Some of our readers might remember the iconic slogan from the cable giant’s heyday that summed up its unique approach to programming:
“It’s not; it’s HBO,” we were told. And as laughably pompous as that may sound in retrospect, at the time, it rang surprisingly true.
If one were to compose a comprehensive history of the past 25 years in American television, it would be difficult not to mention HBO on every other page.
When Sex and the City became an overnight cultural phenomenon in the summer of 1998, industry analysts likely regarded it as a fluke — a one-off instance in which a premium cable channel best known as a secondary market for theatrical movies stumbled onto success with an original series.
However, what HBO executives accomplished in the years that followed could not be dismissed as easily.
The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, Deadwood, and Six Feet Under all established the Home Box Office network as the industry leader in what would later be described as “prestige TV.”
That success continued in the 2010s with shows like Boardwalk Empire, Veep, Silicon Valley, and Succession scoring, winning big with both critics and audiences.
Of course, in 2011, a true underdog series — an adaptation of a very niche (and unfinished) series of fantasy novels — stunned the industry and brought HBO its highest ratings to date.
Ahead of its premiere, few predicted that Game of Thrones would become the biggest show of its decade.
(The horrendous wigs and other evidence of a shoestring budget in that somewhat uneven pilot serve as reminders of how reluctant the network was to gamble on a pair of unproven showrunners.)
At the time, it looked as though GoT would be the start of HBO’s new era of unprecedented success.
But we all know what happened next.
The show fizzled out in its final seasons, concluding with what many have called the most disappointing series finale in TV history.
And that was the beginning of what might be called the Curse of Game of Thrones.
The show wrapped up in 2019, and it now looks as though premium cable might never see such sizable audiences again.
A list of the original HBO shows that premiered in the 2020s contains a lot of quality series but not much in the way of massive hits.
Lovecraft Country, Perry Mason, and Winning Time all received solid reviews — but none of them lasted for more than two seasons.
Compare that to ten years ago when every Sunday night of the year offered at least one buzzed-about HBO show.
The Penguin, The White Lotus, Industry, Somebody Somewhere, and The Gilded Age are all good to fantastic series.
(Somebody Somewhere, in particular, is criminally underrated.)
But none of them has delivered massive ratings.
Yes, HBO has fallen so far that even a show from the DC universe that’s spun off from a massively successful Batman movie frequently fails to crack the two-million viewers mark.
Compare that to the GoT series finale, which was watched by a staggering 19.3 million viewers.
There have been bright spots in recent years, most notably The Last of Us, which scored 4.7 million viewers for its season premiere in January of 2023.
Obviously, that’s a far cry from the numbers that GoT was boasting, but TLoU’s audience grew as the season progressed.
In fact, it nearly doubled. 8.2 million watched the series finale.
The video game adaptation delivered HBO’s second-strongest premiere of the decade, second only to House of the Dragon.
Unfortunately, numbers for that series declined in its second season. Execs are now hopeful that The Last of Us can reverse that trend when its second season premieres next year.
HBO’s decline is perhaps best encapsulated by the first and thus far only Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon.
The show debuted strongly with 10 million viewers. But the Dragon would never soar to those heights again.
In fact, the series’ second season premiere saw viewership decline by a whopping 22 percent.
There were many factors at play here:
Streaming options are splintering TV audiences more and more with each passing year, and last year’s writer and actor’s strikes forced HoD to take a mega-long hiatus that likely led to a decline in viewer interest.
But those same factors have affected every platform, and broadcast networks enjoy roughly the same size audience as they did 10 years ago, as do major basic cable channels.
So what’s the deal? Well, much ink has been spilled on the subject of where exactly HBO went wrong.
Most fingers are pointed squarely at Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, whose marketing missteps include the disastrous decision to rebrand HBO’s streaming app as simply “Max.”
But in a collapse of this scale, there’s almost certainly more than one factor to blame. And the bigwigs at HBO are likely hoping to correct their course by taking drastic action in 2025.
Currently, at least two more Game of Thrones spinoffs are in development.
But Zaslav and company might be starting to feel that the dragon trend has burned itself out. And the next Game of Thrones-sized hit probably won’t be found in Westeros.
What do you think, TV fanatics? Can HBO ever hope to regain its former glory?
Hit the comments section below to share your thoughts!
Watch House of the Dragon Online
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