![]() There was a lapse in what the executives wanted and the creatives were thinking. The show was so big and its ambition so vast, there wasn’t a united, effective understanding on the part of HBO about what it wanted or how best to protect the creators and the showrunners. It’s interesting that you just included Westworld in that group of otherwise canceled shows. Michael Patrick King delivered hundreds of billions of dollars to HBO with Sex and the City, and the idea they canceled the day after the 2005 Emmys was beyond a tad askew in my mind. The Comeback and Enlightened were two cancellations that certainly surprised me because they went against what HBO has stood for. You have situations with Westworld, with Vinyl, with The Comeback, with Enlightened, in terms of the dynamic between executives and the creative talent. There was a period in the past decade, though, where they became much more hands-on and, dare I say, intrusive, according to some showrunners. One great thing HBO did was give creators and showrunners a lot more autonomy and a lot more freedom than the networks. Was there a project where the two seemed furthest apart? You often expose tensions between talent and execs. ![]() It’s very frustrating for a network when they turn down a show and it becomes a huge hit. But I think all three of those could have been on HBO. Nobody can be in a position where they buy every hit, of course. They had the opportunity to read Matthew Weiner’s pilot, and I get into the whole story of what happened. The Crown was an obvious one, but Mad Men kept coming up. Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Crown are the big three. What decisions did you get the sense were most regretted? HBO has made some controversial cancellations, like Deadwood and Rome, and passed on some shows that went on to be big hits like The Crown and Breaking Bad. As a result, there’s a real fighting spirit. ![]() Now in this post-Netflix era, they’ve gone back to feeling like they are the underdog and some of them relish that. The second thing is that, much like ESPN and all of these places, HBO started from humble roots where they were the underdog. ![]() There were some similarities - particularly with ESPN in the sense that there were a significant number of people who have been there for 20, 25, 30 years, so long that when you’re trying to do a book of record, they warmed up and were incredibly helpful across the administrations. Over the course of more than 750 interviews with key sources, Miller reveals how fraught HBO's journey has been, capturing the drama and the comedy off-camera and inside boardrooms as HBO created and mobilized a daring new content universe, and, in doing so, reshaped storytelling and upended our entertainment lives forever.Ī Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company'Perry Mason' Canceled After Two Seasons on HBO J.) to Zendaya, as well as every single living president of HBO-and hundreds of other major players. As he did to great acclaim with SNL in Live from New York with ESPN in Those Guys Have All the Fun and with talent agency CAA in Powerhouse, Miller continues his record of extraordinary access to the most important voices, this time speaking with talents ranging from Abrams (J. In Tinderbox, award-winning journalist James Andrew Miller uncovers a bottomless trove of secrets and surprises, revealing new conflicts, insights, and analysis. By thinking big, trashing tired formulas, and killing off cliches long past their primes, HBO shook off the shackles of convention and led the way to a bolder world of content, opening the door to all that was new, original, and worthy of our attention. The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, The Wire, Succession.HBO has long been the home of epic shows, as well as the source for brilliant new movies, news-making documentaries, and controversial sports journalism. Tinderbox tells the exclusive, explosive, uninhibited true story of HBO and how it burst onto the American scene and screen to detonate a revolution and transform our relationship with television forever. ![]()
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