HBO: Craig Blankenhorn
Here’s one thing I love about blogging. I post a question. You write stuff for me. My employer considers this “work,” and continues to issue me paychecks. To the extent that you buy our advertisers’ products or watch TV programming produced or delivered by Time Warner, you are literally paying to do my work for me.
Where am I going with this? Well, my question today concerns one of my employer’s more lucrative but lately troubled divisions: HBO. The Sopranos, which remains HBO’s most-watched series, goes off the air June 10. Now there are certainly other reasons to subscribe to HBO–The Wire, Entourage, Big Love. But in spite of HBO’s attempts to create “the next Sopranos” (next up, the elliptical-even-for-HBO John from Cincinnati, and good luck with that) those other series have audiences of millions fewer than The Sopranos. So it stands to reason that there are people out there who have HBO more or less solely for Tony & Co.
You’re a TV-intense bunch, so I ask you: if you had HBO to begin with, are you keeping it or dumping it after June 10, and why? If you don’t have HBO, do you watch any of the series on DVD instead (a strategy that, especially for dense shows like The Wire, makes a lot of sense)?
Or did you never think HBO was worth it in the first place? I won’t hold it against you. Just don’t tell my boss I said that.