Lunch at Michael's with HBO's Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler

That lineup boasts the return to HBO of three of its most valued writers and showrunners Alan Ball Six Feet Under David Milch Deadwood and Darren Star Sex and the City each with a new series a renewed commitment from Larry David for at least one additional season of Curb Your Enthusiasm a new drama series from Sopranos writer Terry Winter with Martin Scorsese as an executive producer the final season of one of television39s finest and most underappreciated drama series The Wire and the longawaited arrival of John Adams a sevenhour miniseries adaptation of the Pulitzer Prizewinning novel by David McCulloughPlepler pictured right and Lombardo pictured belowamp160were equally enthusiastic about their success in the digital arena which has proved crucial to the growth of at least two new series they introduced this year Tell Me You Love Me and Flight of the ConchordsquotHBO On Demand is the most monetized and the most successful digital piece in the television industryquot Plepler told Jack Myers and myself quotIt is the digital expansion of our service Our 30 million subscribers are looking to us for a lot of different things sports movies documentaries miniseries movies and series Sixty percent of Hollywood39s movie output is on HBO The addition of On Demand which includes the movies is a very important part of our price value propositionquotThanks to HOD quotpeople are coming to our product midway during the season or after the series endsquot Plepler continued quotPeople came to Rome after they heard about it We39re seeing it now very clearly in the HOD numbers for Tell Me You Love Me Three and a half million people are watching it Over twothirds of its audience is watching that show on its nonpremiere nights The decidedly Rrated Tell Me concluded its first season last Sunday and has been renewed for a second yearquotAs viewing migrates more and more toward On Demand use that39s the sweet spot for usquot Plepler said quotPeople are accustomed to it with HBO and it plays to our strengthsquot HOD was also instrumental in making the struggling Flight of the Conchords enough of a success to merit a second season he noted quotHOD has been extraordinary for that show People are going back and watching it a second or third time on demandquotThe next digital extension for HBO will be the implementation of highdefinition Plepler noted that HBO is quotHD ready on 9095 percent of our programmingquotOf Tell Me You Love Me which began life last summer amid a storm of controversy surrounding its use of fullfrontal male and female nudity and its graphic depiction of sex acts Plepler said quotIt is one of the most honest and bravest attempts to look at intimacy that has ever been on American television I think the longer people are living with it and allowing it to breathe and the characters to develop the more comfortable they are getting with itquotThe next big original series on HBO will likely be True Blood the first series fully developed by Lombardo and Plepler Lombardo a 21year veteran of HBO and Plepler who has been with the network since 1992 were named to their current positions in June 2007 Los Angelesbased Lombardo oversees HBO39s programming group and all of its west coast operations New York Citybased Plepler oversees the network39s original programming and corporate communications groupsThe premise of True Blood Lombardo shared is that quotthe Japanese have invented artificial blood allowing vampires to come out of the closet They are subclass citizens It39s an interesting window into our anxiety watching this world Alan Ball is basing it on the very popular southern gothic vampire novels by Charlaine Harris He bought the first book in an airport and couldn39t put it downquot The pilot has been completed and the second episode of True Blood is currently in productionMeanwhile David Milch is busy developing a new series titled 1971 about corruption inside the New York City police department in the early Seventies It will be told quotthrough the voice of Bill Clarkquot Plepler said noting that Clark was an advisor to Milch on NYPD Blue quotBill is a Vietnam veteran who came back from the war and went undercover to infiltrate the Black Panthers He came out of that with a gold shield at 31 years old Nobody understood how this kid got the gold shield It is through Bill39s eyes that we will see what was going down in law enforcement David is writing as we speak He has been talking about this for five years The good news is David39s in the housequotMilch of course was the creator of the muchadmired Western saga Deadwood which was a success for the network and the illfated drama about surf culture John From Cincinnati a highprofile failure for HBO this past summer quotWe put an unbelievable strain on John in terms of the schedulequot Lombardo admitted quotI think the show was better than the reviewsquotJohn might have survived Plepler offered quothad it come at a different time not following the iconic phenomenon of The Sopranos and had people looked at it without the expectation that it was somehow replacing The Sopranos which was never our intent There were such high expectations with it following Deadwood and The Sopranos As David himself said 39the auguries were not the best39quotquotIn retrospect to not continue with Deadwood was a mistakequot Lombardo observedOn a lighter note Lombardo revealed that Larry David is quotalready at work on a seventh seasonquot of Curb Your Enthusiasm Expect less of a break between season six and season seven than the 21month gap between season five and season six Curb Lombardo asserted quottook too long to come backquotquotWait until you see where Larry goes in season sevenquot Plepler grinned quotWe hope he stays for a very long timequotAmong the other programming news Lombardo and Plepler shared Darren Star39s new series will be titled Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl the final season of The Wire will largely focus on the media in Baltimore and the series from Terry Winter and Martin Scorsese will be set in Atlantic City in the 1920s They also have in development a series from novelist Carl Hiassen Strip Tease Skinny Dip about a golfer in trouble with the mob who is living in the witness protection program and one from Michael Tolkin The Player about bikersThe John Adams miniseries starring Paul Giamatti Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson will premiere March 15 quotWe flew down to show it to David McCullough with the natural trepidation that you are showing it to the masterquot Plepler said quotHe had tears in his eyesquotAnd what about Sopranos creator David Chase Are there any projects in development with him quotHe39s still decompressingquot Lombardo replied quotYou39re beaten down after a run like thatquotInterestingly our conversation at Michael39s restaurant was interrupted at three different times by appearances of past HBO executives at our table First former president of film programming Steve Scheffer then former executive vice president of sales and satellite operations Larry Carlson and lastly former HBO chief Michael FuchsquotMichael was the first person to boldly go where no one had gone and say there is an original programming model for pay cable television that has a real place in the popular culturequot Plepler told us after Fuchs left the table quotThe idea that you could break through the zeitgeist with something on HBO or Showtime was a very revolutionary notion There were many many people who felt that it was not doable He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for pushing that along and really birthing the original programming model at HBO I don39t think anyone would dispute that The tipping point for HBO was not The Sopranos or Sex and the City It was The Larry Sanders Show which was Michael39s show That was in 1992 Sanders convinced people that there really was a way to do something with an original voice to do something you couldn39t get anywhere else to do something that was worth paying for and that frankly was painting on a different canvasquotWith these new series and much more original programming in the pipeline HBO is well positioned to remain dominant in the increasingly crowded media landscape quotWe have a pretty simply mantra which is paraphrasing the Clinton campaign mantra of 3992 39It39s the programming stupid39quot Plepler concluded quotIf we continue to deliver high quality distinctive differentiated work and give our customers the opportunity to watch that when they want to we think our business model is going to continue to grow We39re very well suited to the current environment because we39re not selling eyeballs to advertisers We39re not selling CPMs We are selling a promise that our brand is going to deliver quality and excellence in a lot of different areas of entertainment That39s always going to be something people are going to want even with unprecedented levels of stimuli out therequot

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

Lunch at Michael's with HBO's Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler

Author

Publish date

Channel

Archived in

Ed Martin

The Ad Council, Huntsman Mental Health Foundation and Amazon Announce “The Mind Set” to Support Mental Health - Ad Council InSites

More Videos:

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

Lunch at Michael's with HBO's Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler

Enjoying This Commentary? There's More to Love

Ed Martin

The Ad Council, Huntsman Mental Health Foundation and Amazon Announce “The Mind Set” to Support Mental Health - Ad Council InSites

The payment was successful

Cookies