BEVERLY HILLS, Aug 1 — Vinyl wasn’t worth it anymore, Game of Thrones will run for two more seasons, and Curb Your Enthusiasm will be back next year.
Those were some of the topics that HBO’s new president of programming, Casey Bloys, addressed at the Television Critics Association event here Saturday.
In addition to discussing programming decisions, Bloys also confronted heated questions about whether HBO depicted sexual violence against women far too frequently.
Speaking about the premium cable channel’s expensive flop, Vinyl, Bloys said executives had decided to cancel it after taking a hard look.
“Quite frankly, if I’ve got limited resources, there are other things I want to do,” he said.
“We didn’t think it was worth the producers’ time, our time, our resources to try to move the needle just a little bit more.”
He also said that Game of Thrones would conclude after its eighth season, and he acknowledged that next season’s summer premiere date would mean the show would not be eligible for the 2017 Emmys.
“That’s just something we have to live with,” he said.
For 16 straight years, HBO has led all TV networks with the most Emmy nominations, and Game of Thrones has been the most nominated show for the past three.
With the final seasons of The Leftovers and Girls also coming up, Bloys said he was hopeful that the network’s new slate of shows — including the limited series The Night Of, the Sarah Jessica Parker dark comedy Divorce and the science-fiction drama Westworld — would make up the difference.
HBO has been subjected to pointed criticism recently for several scenes featuring sexual violence against women, particularly in Game of Thrones, The Night Of and Westworld.
Throughout the 30-minute news conference, television critics returned to the issue of violence against women.
Although Bloys acknowledged the criticism (“Point taken,” he said at one point), he also seemed unmoved by the charge and said several times that violence was “spread equally” among men and women.
“Is there a lot of violence in Westworld and Game of Thrones?” he asked.
“I don’t necessarily think it’s isolated to women.”
Later Saturday, Lisa Joy, an executive producer of Westworld, told reporters and critics that any sexual violence in the show was treated with care and it was “not about the fetishizing of those acts — it is about exploring the crime.”
HBO also announced Saturday that its beloved 1990s comedy The Larry Sanders Show would be available on its apps — HBO Go and HBO Now — and would be on demand beginning in September.
The show’s creator and star, Garry Shandling, died in March.
Bloys said that Curb Your Enthusiasm would go into production this fall, and the network later confirmed that the show’s ninth season would begin at some point next year. And Bloys did not rule out that True Detective could return for a third season, after a disappointing second season.
Bloys also talked briefly about the network’s long-gestating animation project with Jon Stewart, saying it would be a parody of a cable news channel. He said he hoped it would be “up and running” in September or October, although HBO had originally said it would premiere earlier this year.
And HBO’s devoted interest in politics is not going anywhere.
When Bloys was asked whether the network would be interested in updating its successful TV movie Game Change about the 2008 election for this year’s wild campaign cycle, he suggested that was a possibility.
He said that the makers of Game Change, Jay Roach and Danny Strong, had been at the Republican National Convention “poking around”. — New York Times
