peter, welcome. thank you for joining us. it's really great to speak to you today. i thank you for asking, inviting. so you've written quite a bit over the years about about hollywood, particularly the movie industry. this book is a really wonderful tour of modern television and

how it evolved into a medium for deep, provocative, original storytelling. we've all become familiar with this term that we're that we're living through the golden age of tv with these shows like mad men and breaking bad and succession. and the list goes on and on. what made you want to tackle this subject now? and also with so much ambition and sweep, this is a book that spans several decades. well, basically, because, you know, movies have declined. you know, they've become you know, they've become a monoculture here of superheroes. you know, basically through marvel, somewhat through dc and there was it just seemed to me that there was less and less interesting work being done in the movies. and a lot of the talent had migrated to tv. i shouldn't say migrated to stem. it was more of a stampede tv. so whereas, you know, movies had

been elevated by this so-called auteur theory into an art form in the in the seventies. but now, now the whole story seemed to have flipped. in other words, it was tv that was the art form. and movies were, you know, sort of merely entertainment. so that's really the that's what prompted me to take take take tv on as far as the second part of the question goes, why several decades? there've been a lot of books on hbo, but hbo is on it. you know, hbo was the pioneer of the so-called golden age of tv, but it wasn't the whole story and other. networks and producers carried on from hbo after hbo kind of slid a little bit in the in the mid nineties when did you detect that shift, that film was was no longer the auteur medium and it

was television. when when do you think that started. are you saw the first hints of that shift or. gosh, i don't know. it's like superhero movie age, a superhero movie. it's hard to pin it down, you know, whether it was, you know, whether it was ritual, you know, which one it was spider-man, you know, iron man. i mean, some of them were good, actually. the iron man movies are pretty good. and some of the spider-man movies are great. like, you know, any genre, there are good ones and bad ones, but on the whole it just got to be one after another after another, and there wasn't much else on and so that that's really prompted my move to tv. you know, i want to go back for back to the history again in a bit. but first i want to ask you a question about the here and now. so we we just saw in hollywood a pair of pretty bruising labor

strikes by by writers and actors that's been resolved. but there was a lot of fallout, a lot of. difficulty met by both sides for the for the talent. certainly. and even you could argue for the companies going through this. you've got big players like disney and warner that are under a lot of financial pressure now. and there's this feeling in hollywood that everyone's trimming costs, reining in production deals. it's it's a different environment. are we was your book looking back at the golden age of tv, are we still in it? is it ending? is it over? good question. because when i started the book, it was supposed to be a tribute or a celebration of this new golden age of tv. but now it's over the course of writing a book. it became not so new anymore. and now many, many people have pronounced the golden age of tv over peak tv dead. so it's, you know, the the writing about tv is full of obituaries for this period.

so i tried to, you know, this this change happened while i was writing it, and i tried to prepare for it. and i think i did basically. and i have a very i guess, you know, somewhat pessimistic or dark ending or the conclusion of the book, which tries to guess what's going to happen in the future. and it's not a pretty picture, particularly, you know, i'm probably one of those people that said peak tv is over. so you can add me to that list of people that that's that's that's claim that, you know, hbo, you mentioned is a key, but it's not the only actor and protagonist here. but you did start with hbo in this book. and most people now, especially if they're younger, they'll think of hbo and they'll think of game of thrones and they'll think of succession. the white lotus, or maybe euphoria. but you start with a very different hbo and tell us a bit

about what it was, this scrappy start up in the seventies and eighties. you spoke extensively to to michael fuchs, the executive in charge at the time. just what was it like? what was their business at the time in the early going? well, i mean, hbo, the whole rationale for hbo, which was the first cable channel, the networks had, the networks use that the business model that the networks used was this sponsor, avatar izing model, which meant that it gave advertisers enormous power over content. they didn't want their products. you know, curios and boy x and whatever else they were advertising. aspirin took it to be adjacent to scenes of sex, violence and controversy. so they kind of imposed a bland purity, cynical fifties era

model on tonto. and so even, you know, even married couples were not allowed to sleep in the same bed. they had to sleep in twin beds adjacent to each other. so hbo came along and it it it used a different it used a subscriber model, not a advertising model, which meant that subscribers free. we chose to invite hbo into their home and the hardware that enabled cable to, you know, spread across the country was privately owned. therefore, the federal communications commission did not have any real jurist fiction over hbo or so. hbo was allowed to do everything that the networks weren't, namely sex, violence and controversy. and it exploited all three of those things to the utmost, you know, when you know, okay, just

one more thing. and hbo very consciously rejected the networks and they wouldn't hire anybody who who had worked at the networks because they you know, they they cultivated the so-called, quote unquote, hbo way of thinking, which was anti network. and it was i see some parallels. i wonder if you agree between hbo breaking into original programing in the early going. it was a lot of it, correct me if i'm wrong, was showing movies. old movies was a big part of of of what they did and going into original programing was sort of a risk and a bet and it felt very familiar to the netflix story. many, you know, decades later, where netflix is showing you dvds and then decides to go into original programing. there was there is kind of it seemed to me there's a real parallel on the risk and that these outsiders trying to get into the inside hollywood game at the time. well, yeah, there there is a

there there is a bit of parallels involved between early hbo and netflix. but netflix went in with, you know, of fee first. you know, it just jumped into it. whereas hbo is fairly cautious and they didn't have the money that netflix had to begin with. so that's why they relied heavily on, you know, on hollywood movies and and they were, you know, they were afraid to, you know, during fuchs is period, they were reluctant to get into original programing because, as fuchs said, their viewership was used to hollywood movies, which are highly polished, are highly, you know, highly professional, professionally executed shows. and they were afraid that if they got into original programing, there, their original shows would appear sloppy and unprofessional

compared to the hollywood movie i've been showing, right? yeah. and, you know, the the the history of of prestige, tv or whatever you want to call it, this, this era of great tv, a lot of people started with the sopranos. you're careful here to note that you say it started with the show. oz the prison show, oz, which was on hbo. what what was it about that show that was so groundbreaking that that made you focus on that as the starting point for everything? well, you know, i think you have to go back to what, first of all, brooke was head of programing at that point. and i think you have to go back to what she told tom fontana, who was the showrunner of oz. he said, don't worry about making your character, your characters likable. yes. so long as they're interesting and relatable, they'll be relatable. and the other thing is what what is what's the biggest. no, no. i've had a you know, for any

showrunner on a new show, which is don't kill off your main character in the first scene or the first episode. yeah. so fontana proceeded to do exactly that. he had his main character, the lead character, burned to death in the first episode of the first season. so he gave fontana an enormous amount of leeway and really unprecedented. do whatever he wanted, and fontana took advantage of that and, you know, portrayed a really tough environment, which is, you know, inside of a prison. and i always use this example. one of the things that he did right away was he showed an aryan nation thug burning a swastika into the -- or the rear end of one of the other prisoners with a cigaret. you know, that's pretty tough stuff. and so nothing like that had ever appeared on network and

that pretty much paved the way for the sopranos because after all, you could pretty much do anything. and it felt like this. what this executive, chris albrecht, had said about you don't need them to be likable. just interesting does seem to be a this this anti-hero theme throughout television, whether it's don draper in mad men or or or walter white or all these big these characters of television that people have come to love, they're all flawed people that the audience is supposed to root for and that that really was not the norm at the time. you're very you're very clear in laying out that's really the opposite of what network tv what i mean network tv heroes were heroes. they acted like heroes in our past. they're supposed to, you know, arrest people and bring them into, you know, to me, to be just, you know, to face a just punishment. and that's supposed to kill people, you know, kill criminals are framed frame innocent men or women beat them, you know, which is what happened routinely on,

you know, on streaming, you know, on cable and streaming shows. and it was also i would just say the other thing that that stood out to me was the wire. and these all these shows that depicted institutions. i mean, you noted this in the book, the depiction of institutions on premium cable on hbo. and then later on on these other cable networks that were really high end, it was kind of more real and gritty. and what was depicting america as it is and not sort of in a in a lighter version of it than had been on network tv, whether it's the cops or the mob or prison that that seemed to be did that was that something that was really hard to convince television executives to go a long way like we want to really show you what the police is like. we want to really show you what the you know, what prison life

is like that that seems to be, you know, have been a leap for a lot of these these companies. well, that's true. i mean, one, when david simon went to hbo to propose the wire and he was immediately, you know, met with a cold shoulder because hbo, his attitude was, what are we going to do, a cop show? when cop shows are all over the networks? and simon's attitude was, well, the network cop shows, i idolized cops and demonized the poor. and he was kind of ripped sort of ripped the, you know, pull the curtain over on what the police were really like and went and and kind of rehabilitate the portrayal of the poor and show them to some degree as victims of the police. so he was going to turn the tables on the network cop shows, and that was certainly that instantly appealed to hbo and that took quite a bit of

research. right. i think you recount david simon. was it was that he embedded with the police or he did. he did some like firsthand reporting to really understand what he was talking about. right. well, he was a journalist, for one thing, for the local when in baltimore and he knew a lot about police. and then he you know, he befriended a one of the cops who became his collaborator. and he also went on ride alongs with cops. a lot of these people who were not who wrote about cops or in a ride alongs and they would find that, you know, they couldn't use the material or that where they were they were confronted with on their work because it was to gravitate to, you know, to, you know, behave or of everybody, the cops and the you know, the criminals were both, you know, were just too wild for network, whereas they were perfect, perfect for cable.

yeah. that's a theme in this book that i really love. there's a lot of these characters who seem trapped in a network tv or in these with these rules. jenji kohan, later the creator of orange is the new black. you talk in weeds involved. which was she on weeds. i might be mixing that up. yeah, that's right. weeds. yeah, but that was another example i thought was of these people that were like ahead of their time, but working for networks that wouldn't let them tell the the real material that was that was true to what they were seeing and thinking and feeling. so that's that's and that's fascinating. i want to shift gears a bit and just talk about a bit about the reporting of this book and how you went about it, because there are some really candid conversations in here. i mean, i talked to tv executives all the time. these are people a lot of these people have left their companies. some of the in some cases years ago. but there are these candid discussions of being fired, the toxic atmosphere, the atmosphere at some of these companies that were producing great television.

and and there was there was this one that stood out to me. it was a i think it was an amc executive who who talked about, you know, she had been fired and pushed out. and she said, may they all rot in hell or something like that. and i said, wow, this is not the kind of quote i've seen very often. how did you go about finding who you wanted to talk to and getting people to open up to that level on the record in a book like this about tv? well well, you know, it was hard. i mean, a lot of people would not open up, you know, and a lot of people did not want to talk to me about this stuff. but, you know, you just keep calling and one person leads to another. it's like a daisy chain, you know? and if you got you know, you know, as i said, i think elsewhere you don't need that many. i mean, you sprinkle them across across the book, it seems like more than there are. but, you know, somebody like you know, especially if they left have left the business, like

somebody like michael fuchs, this was his only hbo was his only job. and that was already, you know, 30, 40 years ago. so he is no compunction about saying what he feels. and he's very he's bitter about it still. he's angry still. and that was true of a lot of people. you know, the one thing that you're citing as far as amc goes, the creative executives. so at amc hated the the finance guys, you know, that employed them. and that was pretty much across the board. so once, you know, one person on amc agreed to talk to me, then he or she would recommend somebody else. and it was, as i said, like a daisy chain. and it wasn't all that hard to get people to talk. it was amazing to see that some of this programing that that is really found fashionable now in tv history was created in almost in spite of dysfunction of

workplaces at several of these companies. that's the way it came across in your book. yeah, well, it's true. i mean. you know, the companies that it created, the some of these shows are pretty out to lunch but they you know, they employed a lot of extremely talented people who actually made the shows. you know, despite almost despite the companies they were working for. that was certainly true of amc. it also just seems like the job of being that tastemaker in hollywood who the kind of show picker, the person who greenlights the show and deals with the talent is is really a hard one to hold down. i mean, it looks like there's people always you got to watch your back. someone always. thinks they can do a better. why is that? why is that such a fraught, you know, job to do in in this business? well, you're out there, you know, when you're picking shows and the shows either succeed or

fail, you know, it's evident to everyone, you know, and there's very little tolerance for failure because the shows are so expensive to produce. you know, when chris albrecht was black go at hbo, they hired four people to replace him, one for cable to replace one. and none of those people had any programing experience. so. programing, you know, executives with experience and who were talented programing were extremely few and far between. and then as a result of that and this is a theme i've seen, this seems to be constant in hollywood, but you really highlight it. there's this fear kind of a fomo in the television business, a fear of missing out on a hit that causes distorts people's behavior once you've passed on mad men like hbo did, or, i believe, on breaking bad, they, of course, didn't get house of

cards. there were some other examples you had in there. maybe it was homeland that must do something to these people where makes it distorts people's behavior that you don't you don't want to to miss out on things that makes you a it makes you say yes to things. maybe you shouldn't as well. yeah. i mean, when somebody from hbo that i spoke to called schmuck insurance. right, right. yeah. they would buy you would buy properties. first of all, to make sure that nobody else bought them, not necessarily to produce them. and you know, when hbo, you know, after all, like left and the program executives went on a buying spree and they bought practically every, you know, you know, they put on their contract prop practically every signature great writer, a playwright, whatever, you know, at that period at that time and none of

these things, they actually produced, you know, they had a 5000, you know, at least contracts. and and they prevented what it did was that prevented all these people from submitting work to other other networks. are there cable channels? so that's why they call it schmuck insurance, because you didn't want to be the schmuck that. right. you know, that didn't buy mad men. and what amc did develop it. how did the talent react to that? you know, sitting on your script for years and pretending to do shows, alan hated it because it tied them up and tied their hands, you know, and mike white, who did the white lotus, you know, commented on the fact that hbo had tied up a couple of his properties and and he was on it was, you know, to as i said, to take them anywhere else. so we've talked we talked a lot about hbo basic cable, also was

in the game here in in all through the the arts and through the 20 tens and producing some of these best known shows we know and love but and you talk about effects which in the early going had shows likehe shield and damages and and there have been many more of the americans later on but but they they talked there was there's a showrunner you talked to you just said, you know, this stuff was every bit as good as the sopranos, but was overlooked. it was it didn't quite ever achieve the same, you know, acclaim critically or this just the same attention for that for those shows. did you agree with that? did you find that for more people and that world of the kind of the basic cable effects, amc, etc., world, even even just anyone that wasn't hbo basically. well, i mean, the sopranos kind of overshadowed everything and a

lot of people felt that, you know, needless to say, their shows were as good as soprano shows. and in many cases they were. but, you know why the sopranos had that over overwhelming impact? i is is is is a great question. i mean, it was definitely a wonderful show, but did it deserve to overshadow everything that followed? probably not dead. for example, i thought it was a great show. you know, in many ways, you know better than the sopranos. but, you know, it was killed after three seasons and didn't you know, didn't begin to have that kind of impact. what is does the sopranos sort of have a a legacy beyond just influencing you? you know, the idea of the antihero and and these and in this more gritty form of

television, does it have has it was david chase, the creator, ceding kind of a generation of have you have you seen his the people who worked for him out in the rest of the business, sort of fanning out and creating stuff that emanates from the sopranos. what's the the scope of the impact that that that show had? yeah, there was there was a kind of while there was kind of hbo diaspora people leaving hbo and going to other cable channels and eventually streamers, but it was also to some degree true of the sopranos. i mean, i think somewhere outside it all was laid back to the sopranos was and everyone practically everyone who came after tipped their hat at the sopranos. and it's acknowledged that the influence of the sopranos, partly it was introducing the anti-hero, which is extremely important, and played a role in almost every single show that followed the sopranos. but there were other things as well. i mean, the linking of the cop

or the bad cop or the good bad guy to the family and the family kitchen and sort of a normal system of normal. family story was very, very important. and that was one of the things that david chase did right off the bat. you know, these shows were also really expensive. and you mentioned the tensions between the creatives and the financial types earlier, i was just thinking, you know, in in streaming, netflix was allowed to buy wall street to spend a lot of money on shows, partially because there was a buy in to its too its whole model. it sort of was treated like a tech company. you don't even need to make profit. you can borrow money, spend tons of money. and it's all part of sort of the business case of netflix. but what's interesting is that these cable companies, even by

2014 or 15, when people were cutting the cable cord, smart cable executives knew that this really lucrative industry that had been so lucrative for decades was sort of plateauing or starting to be in decline. and i'm struck by despite that, there was a real arms race. people are throwing money at shows. it goes from 2 million an episode to 5 million to 10 million to 12 million an episode for a show. why was nobody cautious like none of these people cautious about? maybe. maybe this doesn't make sense. maybe this is a rational. well, i think that you know, there was just a lot of, you know, there was a lot of excite around cable and, you know, and the consequent there was a lot of competition and one of the ways you win competitions by throwing money and it was a little bit i guess this is a period before the big tech companies like apple and amazon entered the streaming space,

which threw everything out of whack. but i think it was partly just the the fierceness of the competition between among the various cable networks initially, one of the appeals of mad men was that it was rooted, very inexpensive, but as you know, one show followed another. they became more and more expensive. and eventually netflix just blew everything out of the water. yeah. and well, when netflix of course, that's when they sort of got into the originals game before netflix did that, as you document here, it was basically buying people's old shs in the early going and you know, moving from being a dvd provider to a streaming of old shows and movies provider and hollywood, all these companies were more than happy to to sell their programing to netflix. as you show and you talked about amc, a really classic example of

this was was licensing. i think it was one of the final seasons or maybe the last season of breaking bad to netflix. and it it resulted in this huge ratings increase of people watching the show on amc. so they watched it on netflix and they went back at the time, the ceo of amc, josh c-span, sort of was probably the leading guy to say netflix is really can help us that obviously didn't turn out to be the case. what did you notice from talking to all these executives? what level of regret was there for kind of feeding the netflix beast the way that they did, including amc? well, i don't know that there was a i mean, it's so far in the past, i don't know that there was actually a level of regret. i mean, there was there was certainly people at the time like albrecht kirby, who went to starz, who was extremely reluctant to talk licensing shows for two to netflix,

precisely for that reason. and, you know, jeff bewkes, who was head of hbo and warner brothers, famously remarked that called streamers, they are granny and army not to be afraid of them. they weren't going to go anywhere. they didn't amount to anything. so there was a lot of dismiss, a dismissive attitude towards the streamers when they started. and i think people really understood. in fact, one of the things that amazed me was that there was a planet one point for hbo to find netflix and bewkes due because never for i think, $2 billion, something like that. and bewkes never did it for a variety of reasons. but at one point, reed hastings, who who founded netflix, was asked whether he would have sold it to hbo for that amount of money and he said, yes.

so you might have had a universe where hbo and that owned netflix never, never happened. so it's interesting to explore that sort of what ifs. yeah, the alternate universe, i think comcast probably had a chance. hbo had a chance. and you're mentioning jeff bewkes, the ceo of time warner at the time. i don't know if he'll if he'll ever live down the albanian army, which was a really famous one. and sort of like reed hastings will never be ripped out by the competition and sleaze slate. that's right. yeah, he's got real competition. real competition now. well, any, any account of of peak tv prestige tv would not be complete without talking about game of thrones. this you highlighted here that it really was kind of a mess at the beginning. talk about, i mean, this this show really like almost might not have happened and and it was

there were some some things that were going badly wrong when it first started coming together. just to talk a little bit about that show and and how it got off the ground. well, benioff and weiss were the showrunner owners, the writers and showrunners on game of thrones. neither of them had any experience in tv whatsoever. and in fact, you know, they you know, years later after game of thrones had been become this amazing hit, they came back and described their first encounter with hbo and admitted that they had a rough ride to richard plepler, who is head of hbo at the time, telling him that, you know, because the show had well, there were a couple of reasons why it was a misfit for hbo. one of them was that it was a genre show. secondly, it was a fantasy. and plepler said to said, as

reported, to have said something like, what are we, the sci fi channel? because they were already writing the vampire show and they which escapes me at the moment. and so game and game of thrones also was was a bank. but, you know, it was going to pass the bank because it had, you know, it was it was going to be shot in three countries. it was going to be have, you know, massive battles. and. benioff and weiss told plepler that all these battles are going to be off camera and they were going to, you know, so they were not going to cause they're not going to cost hbo or anything. and they downplayed the fantasy element because they didn't want to just get fantasy in their heads to watch it. they wanted to get all sorts of people a broader audience. so they were not entirely frank with what? plepler when they when they saw game of thrones two to hbo, they

did a lot. they ultimately did a lot of things that they said they weren't going to do. and then because they had no experience, the first pilot, it was the first version of the pilot was awful. and you know, everybody agreed on that, including benioff and weiss and they had to reshoot it. and the difference between the second version and the first version was dramatic. and that's what, you know, everybody nobody could believe that they had rescued such a horrible pilot and made a head out of it. and it seems like they all kind of figured out that a show that was going to have the battles off camera was going to feel a bit small and not and not work. and so they were willing to put put a lot of money in to do that. well, eventually people said, you know, the the the first pilot was so limited that somebody said they could have

shot it in burbank, wasn't where. whereas, in fact, they shot it with three different countries. so as somebody as the cinematographer said. they hadn't succeeded in translating what was on the page onto the screen and that was the big problem. and so when they when they sent it back for a second pilot or redo the pilot, that's what they said. they they made it much more dramatic, much more scenic, much more visual. why do you suppose you've seen a lot of tv and what works and what shows have clicked? and no one ever really knows why. but why do you suppose a show that that is heavy on fantasy and hard to pronounce names and you've got to really pay attention if you want to know which. there's so many characters and storylines, it's actually hard to keep track of. why do you suppose reached, you know, the ratings suggest that it reached a pretty broad audience not, you know, it wasn't like a niche group of people that just were super passionate. so what do you think clicked to

give it that reach? well, i think it you know, it it well, first of all, in this initially it didn't have that got bad news the first couple of episodes got terrible in the press. so it took a while for them to, you know, to sort of hit their stride. but i think, you know, ultimately because it dealt with human theme, even though the even that was a fantasy. so that it dealt with power, you know, when benioff and weiss were selling it to plepler, they saw that it's a show about a political show about power. and they said something about you, you know, after a couple of episodes, you forget where you are. you know, you could be in paris or london or whatever. and it was all about, you know, universal human themes. and i think that's true. and, you know, it's us versus them, which is a classic theme. and and and science fiction and

a lot of other, you know, as well, you know, with the white walkers, you know, threatening to invade from the north and all that sort of stuff and and the kind of promiscuous relationship within some of the families in the show was, you know, again offered in a way and offered a way into a whole very wide audience. peter, are you a do you happen to be a taylor swift fan, a swifty? well, i'm not actually, not because i don't like her, but just because i've never seen an actress before. and the documentary on the documentary concert show has come into the local theater around where i live, and i'm definitely planning to see it. well, you'll hear probably a song called anti-hero, and there's a line in it i'll read to you. it must be exhausting. always rooting for the

anti-hero. and i always whenever i hear that, i always think about television. i said, it's been two decades of rooting for the anti-hero. do you think audiences are ready for and maybe apple's ted lasso is evidence of this, but too, rooting for just a nice guy who is the hero as opposed the anti-hero? have we done too much of it at this point? well, i think that's an interesting question, because one of the reviews of my book was called how ted lasso killed tony soprano, which pretty much i guess sums up the book. and i think there's definitely a move away from the anti-hero. i don't know if it's because people have gotten tired of them or just because things in the real world, you know, classically entertainment, you know, not like movies and, tv, but before that, you know, novels and other forms of entertainment theater have been looked at as escapism, where you can get away from the enabler

and people to get away from the. horrors of the real world. and those horrors have become more and more pronounced. so i think that there is a definitely a moved away from and hear us also because. well, i just think people, you know, to some degree, i guess people have gotten tired of it. but, you know, even vince gilligan, who did breaking bad, which has a, you know, one of the most the ultimate anti-hero. yeah. ultimate anti-heroes is doing another show for apple now and says he's finished with anti-heroes. so i think that's definitely true. but i think they're i don't know if it's that people are getting tired of em or there are other reasons that longer longing for escapism, etc., etc. i mean, these things come in cycles. so it's not surprising that, you know, we always turn to some

degree of anti-heroes. yeah, well, that that makes sense. it would be apple. apple or tim cook, the ceo, has had an interesting philosophy on programing. you got into it a little bit in the book where he's kind of wanted a bit more family friendly to it, less nudity, less foul language. i don't know is that still the case? is or or is is that something that you think is that was just there there entry point and into all this but then once they got into hollywood realized, well, we're just going to have to make the kind of shows everyone makes or is it like are there apple values that are tv? i think there are apple values is that, you know, they just apparently that jon stewart's show go because he was bringing up sensitive subjects like china china is a big manufacturer of

iphones and you know apple didn't want him, you know, trashing china on his show or i he was, you know, and then there was apparently a sofia coppola show that where they that adaptation of an idea for it and know where the heroine a female character was unlikable and they dropped that as well. so i don't think it's the past at all. i think apple is still doing that. you know, one of the we're talking about apple and tech companies in general now obviously are big players, not just apple, but amazon and, you know, netflix was in its own lane, i guess. but you've got these companies. what i always hear from executives in hollywood is that this frustrates and that they're really in a different business than us. and we're all judged for, you know, the same in the same way

in terms of our programing and how do our jobs. but apple is basically in the devices and hardware business. amazon is shipping us stuff and television is more or less an afterthought for that, for their huge core business. do you think that the tech tech involvement in entertainment and hollywood, is this a flirtation or is this a permanent thing? i think it's a permanent thing because apple has, you know, has transformed itself into from a hardware company, into a service company, through all these things like apple music, apple tv or apple arcade, you know, and apparently the profit margins for service are much higher than they are for hardware. so for that reason alone, you know, it's all about money. that's let's face it, for that reason alone, i think apple is is in this for the long haul and

and it's not about to rock the boat. so you know so you know i don't think amazon and apple are going anywhere quickly. and the other factor i think of these big of these big tech companies coming into the streaming space, is that just dump money on these shows, at least they have in the past now, they may be cutting back now, but they don't money on these shows and. well, you know, money is a double edged sword. it makes the shows they can attract better talent and better writing, better direction, better showrunning, better acting, better actors by paying them more. but it also means that since, you know, apple and amazon want a return, their investment that it makes the shows risk averse and you know you see that in in this you know and disney at disney with the superhero

phenomena on where these superheroes are extremely valuable intellectual property and then none of them ever die they all just if one of them dies in one universe, they pop up in another. so, you know, money alone, which is what these. tech companies have to offer, as i is a double edged sword. yeah. i mean it's money doesn't it doesn't translate into create necessarily and you started out by talking about how, you know, there was a refuge for creative ways to television to this medium because of what was going on in film with the superhero. overload. how do you assess the state of creativity now in hollywood, including in tv? is it are the good ideas being made or is it has that kind of lowest common denominator? the thing that you talk about in film is that now come to to television and streaming where

all this ip is now being exploited there as well. well, i think, first of all, it's hard to tell because i think right now i'm finding it hard to find things to watch. but part of that is the after effects of the pandemic and the strike and the fact that nothing was being made for so such a lengthy period of time. on the other hand, i do think that the extreme competition among the streamers with each streamer trying to reach the largest possible audience at, you know, coupled with the fact that streaming is streaming now does is the streaming model doesn't seem to be as profitable as people thought it was going to be to begin with has the result of that is the distinctions between streaming and the old networks are breaking down.

so, you know, the way you reach the biggest possible audiences is by not offending anyone and being as bland as possible. and that's what i think a lot of the streamers are reaching for now. unfortunately, you quoted an executive saying netflix is is kind of becoming like cbs. i think that was the comparison or maybe was either netflix or hbo, but it was a comparison that was apt stood out to me like at a certain point when you reach a certain scale or you as you're saying, is it just by necessity you're going to have to make very broad, appealing content. otherwise what how are you serving these. 230 million odd people or is that fundamentally intended, even with doing the kind of really provoke of programing that a lot of your book is about? well, netflix is pretty much abandoned. abandoned it. i mean, you know, at the beginning, it's so i think i

said hbo wouldn't hire anybody who had worked on for the networks, whereas now. and that was true. that was true. netflix and that was true of netflix as well. and now they're sort of hiring people from the studios, from the networks to work at netflix, not because not in spite of their studio or network values, but because of that. so i think that, you know, the whole model has changing and not for the good. i think it's a the other thing is that, you know, because netflix has not been this profitable, none of the streamers have been profitable as people thought they were going to be. they're changing they're changing the model. so they're they're inaugurating an advertising driven tiers, which are about half as expensive as ad free tiers. and i think once you get advertisers in the door they're

they're going to try to impose the same limitations on programing as they imposed on the networks. so that seems to me a really, you know, a danger a danger sign. you think it's going to make the having ads on streaming services just inherently going to make people more these programmers a lot more cautious? yes, exactly. exactly. that's so maybe, you know, with networks that just didn't want to be, you know, advertisers sort of, you know, from their point of view, you know, justifiably didn't want to be adjacent to scenes, you know, that we're going to see where people go off. and i think the same is true are going to be true of streaming. right. should it be any different? yeah, it's it's early days. and the ad the ad services are still growing and but but it is that's a good point. and something to look out for, do you think? i think netflix has 50 million

people signed up on its f ad on its ad supported tier. yeah and it's disney is trying really hard to get people to sign up for ads supported hulu for example if you try to buy the ad free one, it's now like $18 a month. so they really they really want people to be watching ads. so i think you will see you will see a lot a lot more ads and a lot more people will be getting those services. i mean, netflix is back, back on everything that made it. netflix, i mean, not only if they introduced, but they stopped dropping pages, just bingeing. and now they've they've ended it essentially because it's too expensive. you know, you can't drop they can't afford to drop $100 million or $200 million series and one one day do a talent like this. the bingeing model. i'm sure it's not monolithic but but you know ted sarandos, the netflix now co-ceo, is was

pretty religious on that like you know we want to do do this the way that you would binge on a dvd. it's the same thing and it kind of makes sense. i recall once having a conversation with jenji kohan that orange is the new black creator who recalled they put out a season and then she was in the airport like five days later and someone said, when's the next season coming? it's like, i just finished this season and it must be a tremendous amount of pressure too on the talent when people can consume your show on a weekend. yeah, i don't. i, i don't know how the town felt. i think, you know, i think people have probably mixed feelings about it. but, you know, i certainly know that town's ambivalent about streaming in general because, you know, i interviewed robert and michelle king know we did the good wife and on cbs, but they've also done a lot of streaming shows and they're

there position is that streaming allows too much freedom. you know, and a lot of these streaming shows feel padded and go on, you know, more episodes in there should be. and i think there's a lot of truth in that. did they still relish the freedom they had done? the good wife on cbs and then the good fight was on on streaming, correct? yeah. i think i think they still relish the freedom of of streaming even they they're critical of it. at the same time. right. they were able to do storylines on during trump that were or on china or i recall that were that were pretty that that seemed like they'd be a stretch to put on to put on network. so but i but i do hear what you're saying that there's maybe there's a the routine in the strictures and discipline of of you're going to do your, you know, 22 minutes of content or 40 or whatever and this many episodes, maybe when you take that away, not necessarily good

creative leave people can can in directions that they shouldn't or just becomes an unwieldy, undisciplined you know, it's throwing out falling out of season because they have to there is a there was a show recently canceled on on hbo called winning time i care deeply about this as a boston celtics fan, but it's a is a it's a show about the the lakers dynasty of the eighties. and it was i think, considered, you know, sort of considered one of the bigger bets hbo was making. it's on hbo and and it was people were a bit surprised when it was canceled. and a lot of fans were upset that it was canceled after. two seasons. and i was just wondering that the kind of show that because of the cost pressures of the industry now and then, this new era of, you know, wondering if streaming is as good a business

as everyone thought and all of that. is this a show that gets canceled now but maybe wouldn't have ten years ago that this was the sort of thing that you would just keep, keep doing for five seasons if it was 2016 or so? i don't i don't know i don't know how much that show cost and and fortunately, i'm not a mind reader. you, you know, you know, david zaslav, who now runs the company that owns hbo, has gotten a lot of flak lately for ruining hbo. first of all, it changed the name to it. first to hbo, max, and then just max. and now, you know, hbo used to be the, you know, the prestige channel, the first place and any creative person would go to get financing for their shows. and now, you know, some of those shows are still on the air and casey bloys, who's been at hbo

for years and is extremely talented as a programmer, i mean, is still there, but you also have you know, you tune into hbo and you also will, you know, discovery shows like these reality mr. pimple popper and shows like that. so that's kind of a lot of outrage. it's at zasloff or what he's done to hbo, so it's not really i'm not really answering your but it's i don't know the answer but but hbo has changed for the worse probably over the last couple of years. it's it's interesting because hbo is probably we've been through this period of mergers and big mergers in the industry for the past, say, decade. and hbo has been involved in a couple of them, changing hands once it was owned by the phone company at&t then. now, as you mentioned, as part of warner brothers, discovery as merged with discovery, the brand itself has sort of changed.

it's gone through all these different iterations. it's now part of this max streaming service. does the brand still exist to you like and like the people you talk to, is there still a clear you know, this is an hbo show versus this is a max show. do people understand that difference? i don't know. i mean, i think it brand is is is less i mean is less is diminishing because, you know, you know, max, if you go max, i mean, there are hbo shows within max. say hbo, but there's also all this other stuff. so inevitably, the the brand is going to be diminished. i don't think there's any question about it. you you know, you can't you go to hbo and there's no longer or you go to max and there's no longer a guarantee of quality, put it that way. there's just a lot of other stuff, just not high quality. you've seen a lot of it of

different corporate strategies and tactics, i'm sure, over the years from covering this, one of the things that i've noticed under you mentioned david zaslav, the ceo of of warner brothers discovery. he has been using this tactic of not just canceling shows, but actually removing, removing shows from streaming services or not releasing completely produced pieces of content like a movie. is that new? was that is that really new? and is that how is that landed? guess in the world of of hollywood does have does it have any cost or price with with talent to do that because it to me it seems pretty shocking when you make a whole thing and then you never release it. yeah. i mean, talent doesn't like that. i mean, they they had a fully finished show called back girl. i think it costs something like $90 million or something and they're just used it as a tax

write off. first of all, zaslav took on that discovery, took on all this debt, $45 billion, $50 billion or $55 billion. when they brought you know, when they combined with hbo and warner brothers and his trying to reduce this debt. so he's using some of these shows. he's not releasing. we're not releasing or not airing already made shows, completed shows. and using them as tax write offs. and the talent is like completely freaked out. and he's gotten a lot of criticism for it. and. it it's not a good look. the optics of, as i say, are bad for, you know, for for zaslav and for hbo and for discovery. you know, there's nothing worse than, you know, i mean, you know, killing it, you're seeing a show as a tack. i mean, it's a tax write is, you know, as a horrible.

whatever. you know, we're just unbelievable. one more really quick one, peter, do you think all this really is going to be resolved? the streaming if streaming works as a business, do you think that's to happen? do you think we're going to see streaming click as a really good, profitable business? well, i think probably. i'm guessing. yes, because these are these as supported tiers are going to get very popular. so i think and people you know, people like streaming because it gives you a phrase you from then that work schedule or the cable schedule, you can watch anything you want whenever. you want to watch it on your own time, your own schedule, make your own schedule. so it's incredibly especially since the studios and a lot of these companies that owned by studios and streaming are releasing films in theaters and streaming services. is it sometimes it once at the

same time is sometimes streaming a few weeks later. so i scorsese is killers of the flower moon is going to appear shortly on apple. so people you know, it's so convenient for people instead of negotiating and going downtown, paying for parking, you know, a whole expensive theater tickets, they just sit at home and watching on streaming. and i don't think you're going to replace that, but i think the the the whole model. so i think streaming is not going to go away, but the whole model is going to change. it's not going to be the bonanza that we thought it would be. well, peter, a fascinating book, fascinating conversation. thank you so much for joining us.