Exclusive Interview: HBO’s Richard Plepler & Michael Lombardo

February 27, 2012 World Screen Top Stories

PREMIUM: Richard Plepler, HBO’s co-president, and Michael Lombardo, president of programming, discuss with World Screen Newsflash their quest for distinctive and genre-defining shows that customers can’t do without.

Passionate engagement—that is what HBO wants from its subscribers.

A key component in eliciting such viewer loyalty has been the variety of the slate of original programming the pay-TV company has had on offer. For nearly five years, Plepler and Lombardo have been partners in the search for shows their customers can’t do without.

Launched as a satellite service in 1972 with the aim of offering viewers at home theatrical films uninterrupted by commercials—with the apropos name of Home Box Office—HBO soon branched out into other genres. But management knew that whatever it offered had to be something viewers couldn’t get anywhere else, whether blockbuster movies, sports or award-winning documentaries.
 
Yet, there was the need to provide more in order to brand HBO as a truly different service. Its tagline after all was: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” The answer was original series. One of the first was the satirical sitcom The Larry Sanders Show, which premiered in 1992. Oz was the first original hour-long drama. It premiered in 1997 and certainly was not a traditional television series. It was a gritty, realistic depiction of life in a maximum-security prison. 1999 saw the debut of The Sopranos, the multi-award-winning series about mobsters in New Jersey. It was widely credited as the watershed series that changed television dramas forever from formulaic, plot-driven medical, cop or legal procedurals to shows that delved into characters—slowly peeling off layer after layer of human flaws, contradiction, conflicted intentions and questionable morality. No longer were viewers lulled into comfortable, stereotypical settings and situations. HBO series could be unsettling or disturbing like Six Feet Under or The Wire or hilarious or pushing the envelope like Curb Your Enthusiasm or Sex and the City.
 
When The Sopranos ended in 2007, there was much speculation about how HBO could match that level of success. But HBO had already become the first port of call for writers seeking to pursue their vision and Plepler and Lombardo had been courting talent and receiving pitches. The result of their efforts includes True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, and the recent Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman is not the only feature-film veteran to have crossed over to the small screen. Martin Scorsese directed the pilot of Boardwalk and serves as one of the series’ executive producers, Michael Mann directed Luck and Aaron Sorkin penned the upcoming series Newsroom. HBO’s mini-series and movies also attract the likes of Kate Winslet, Michael Douglas and Nicole Kidman. In 2011, HBO’s original productions won four Golden Globes and 19 Primetime Emmys.
 

WS: HBO has a relationship with its subscribers, not with advertisers. How does it shape your original productions strategy?
PLEPLER: You’ve put you’re finger on it very well, what we are selling to our subscribers is a brand. The key to our brand is to be distinctive, original, and to create programming that people feel they cannot get anywhere else, and which speaks to quality. We believe that if we can continue to deliver, across the original-programming landscape, those original voices, which come from the talent that we are fortunate enough to work with, we are going to continue to deliver on our brand promise to our customer—and that promise is you get something here that is special. That is our job each and every day, to wake up and say, how do we find the next piece of quality and deliver it to our subscribers? If we continue to do that, there will be, I think, continued response and excitement about our brand.
 
WS: The Sopranos set the bar so high, as a result of that success, what types of series do you look for, what fits the HBO brand?
PLEPLER: The Sopranos was of course a transcendent piece of popular entertainment, but we are not looking to ever find the next Sopranos, there is no such thing. What we are looking for always is the next high-quality piece of programming and we believe, with gratitude, that Boardwalk Empire represents that, Game of Thrones represents that, Luck represents that and True Blood represents that. Aaron Sorkin’s new show Newsroom, Armando Iannucci’s new show called Veep, Lena Dunham’s new show called Girls, these are all, in our opinion, in the tradition of HBO high-quality programming. That is what we are selling.
 
It’s very important that you define success correctly every day. And there is always the temptation to define success as your last success. And the truth is that success is really about original voices. And you never know when that original voice is going to come in the door. So you need to have a culture which is responsive and open to those original voices.
 
WS: HBO is a place that allows writers and showrunners to follow their vision. Would you give some examples of how you have done that?
LOMBARDO: There are many. I can start with shows that are successful, for example, Boardwalk Empire. Terry Winter decided what he wanted to write about, the 1920s, and about this character loosely based on a real character. The scope of it was something he believed in. It meant, for us, that the show was going to be more expensive than we would have hoped. It meant that it was a period piece. Initially, when we had talked about Atlantic City, we thought he might gravitate toward something modern, but this moment in history is what moved him. That’s the character of almost all of our shows.
 
Take a show like Enlightened; it has a very specific tone. There are people who love that show and there are people who do not get that show. But it is absolutely true to the creator’s voice. You can feel that Enlightened is not a show that we manipulate or worry about getting the largest number of eyeballs. When we sign on with a creator, our notes, at their best, should hopefully help them achieve what they set out to achieve. Our notes are not about changing the show into one that we think could be more successful by some metrics other than the happiness of the creator. You can see that very clearly in Enlightened, you can see that very clearly in Luck. If there is a way to write a particular narrative from A to B, David Milch [the creator of Luck] is not necessarily interested in writing that way. He’s interested in the detours—the detours of human emotion, the detours in storytelling. Some of that makes for a more attenuated narrative. If you pull out a book on Television 101, that would be not something that they’d encourage you to do, yet there is such a beauty and such a power in his writing, that’s why we are in business with David Milch. We knew that going in. We’re not in business with David Milch to hope he writes like another writer—and part of that journey is that he takes his time in articulating the story and getting there.
 
WS: Since you are not advertiser-supported—you get income from subscribers—may I assume that with a fairly constant subscriber base, you have a better idea each year of what your programming budget will be than, say, Leslie Moonves does, as CBS depends on advertising?
PLEPLER: The essential insight of your question is correct. We have a relatively predictable revenue stream. Obviously we seek to grow it every year. We are able to justify [our price increases] because we are not only giving our distributors more value, but through such technologies as HBO GO and HBO On Demand, we are giving them a variety of ways for their customers to watch our programming, which adds to value. We are growing internationally, which adds to our revenue. We’re selling into more markets. We are building more networks. All of these things contribute to our growth. We know and are able to plan, reasonably well, over three- to four-year cycles and that is very, very helpful in enabling us to frame out what we want to do. What Mike and I have sought to do from the beginning, four and a half years ago, is try to get about 100 hours of original series every year. We’re probably now somewhere in the low 80s, so we have a little bit more that we can still do. That doesn’t include our documentary programming, our sports programming, our specials, comedy or music, or our original movies. But in terms of the series genre, we are looking to do about 100 hours and we thankfully have the resources to be able to do that.
 
WS: If a broadcast network has a show whose ratings increase, it can charge advertisers more. Are there ways you can increase your revenues as a series becomes more successful?
PLEPLER: Not in the same way. What enables us to continue to leverage our brand with our distributors and our customers is the quality and consistency of our programming. So as shows become more and more popular, whether it’s True Blood or Game of Thrones or Boardwalk, that creates a certain passionate engagement with our customers. As we create passionate engagement, obviously they become more addicted to our network and to our brand. The longer we can hold a subscriber, the more of that revenue flows into the bottom line and P&L of our company. So preserving subscriber life for two or three or four months longer has an immediate impact on our bottom line. We believe that the way to secure added addictive passionate engagement from our subscribers is more and more quality shows that they don’t want to miss. In that way there is a direct link between the extension of a series and the continued loyalty of our customers.
 
WS: International sales also contribute to your revenues.
PLEPLER: Charles Schrager, who heads up international sales, will tell you this in more detail than I can, but when Boardwalk Empire or Game of Thrones become major hits, and he is selling them internationally, he obviously can command higher dollars as he moves that deal further into a four- or five-year plan. [Our programming] does very well internationally and when Mike and I speak to international audiences we see that there is an appetite all over the world for quality programming, for our brand of original programming. And whether we are in London, or Spain, or talking to international buyers in Cannes, we hear over and over again that there is a real audience for what we do.
 
WS: Since you aren’t driven by ratings the way broadcast and cable networks are, how do you decide when to cancel a show?
LOMBARDO: It’s not correct to say we don’t care at all about ratings. It is one of the things we look at certainly. You want to know that your show is connecting with some group. I don’t think we’re making decisions based solely on the number of eyeballs. What we are looking for is, Does the show have places to go creatively? Are there places the creator still wants to take us and still feel vital and interesting? And it’s very important to us that the shows feel like there is passionate engagement by the consumer. Our shows don’t have to be everyone’s favorite, but they better be somebody’s favorite. When someone is making a decision every month, whether to continue paying for HBO, there has to be something on our service that they just can’t imagine not having every month. For some people that show is a mini-series like Mildred Pierce, an original film like Too Big To Fail, boxing or series like True Blood and Game of Thrones.
 
In addition, right now, our resources dictate that we are programming original series one night a week: Sunday night. When we want to bring in new shows, there comes a point where those decisions become harder and harder. We tried this year to move a show from Sunday to Monday. That is very hard for us to do. We don’t have the marketing resources to compete with the networks and we can’t program another night for the entire year. It’s just not a successful way for us to launch a show.
 
Limited shelf space is increasingly an issue for us. We make hard decisions on that basis. Our considerations are: is the audience growing or is it declining? Is this a show that we are hearing is a must-have show for people? And we ask creators, where do you want to go, what do you have to say? Those are hard decisions.
 
WS: I can imagine. For a long time HBO has been attracting feature film talent. What does HBO offer them?
LOMBARDO: There are two things happening. One is a shift in the movie business where the kinds of movies that are getting made today are very different from the movies that got made ten years ago. A lot of what I will call serious filmmakers, who are interested in adult stories, aren’t finding the opportunities at the studios that they found ten years ago. Second, and more important, a great script and great writing attract great directors. It’s as simple as that. There is nothing better to attract talent than to start with a great script. Being in a non ad-supported environment is very important for directors to feel that their work will be seen in its continuity. They know we will give them the kind of support they need in terms of their own vision, in terms of casting and of the look and feel of a show. There is no conscious decision or effort to woo people from the feature-film world because we have some excellent directors. Some of our most talented directors, in fact, have worked on the small screen only.
 
The phenomenon of movie talent working in television [also applies to actors]. We are about to start shooting an HBO film [Behind The Candelabra] with Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, directed by Steven Soderbergh. We had one in March [Game Change] with Julianne Moore and Fred Harris. We have a very sexy romantic film [Hemingway & Gellhorn] later in the year with Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. That is a paradigm shift. Ten years ago and even five years ago, there used to be a line that talent didn’t cross—they just did movies and didn’t do anything for the smaller screen. We are seeing that certainly in movies and in series it’s all about the material. With a good script on HBO, we can have a conversation with anybody and that is exciting.
 
WS: They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. There are a number other channels that are going after high-quality, event original productions, such as Showtime, Starz, AMC, IFC, FX. Is this competition taking potential talent away from HBO?
PLEPLER: The answer is unequivocally no. We hear over and over again from producers, agents, managers and actors who want to be at HBO. I say over and over again, and it’s true, this is not a zero-sum game. It does not hurt HBO if there is a good show on AMC or a good show on Showtime. All that would hurt HBO is if we somehow stopped playing our game as we are capable of playing it. As long as we do that, we have a line at the door of showrunners, writers and producers and auteurs who want to work with us. Our challenge, quite frankly is figuring out a way to do all the things we want to do, it’s not making sure we have enough talent at the door to do them.
 
WS: BSkyB’s Sky Atlantic is the home of HBO in the U.K. Are there plans to make deals with other media companies for other channels like Sky Atlantic?
PLEPLER: This is a question of the market dictating what makes sense and if the market dictates that something makes sense, Simon [Sutton, the president of HBO International and Content Distribution] and Charles will make that happen. If selling programming into a particular market is what makes sense for HBO’s expansion in that region, that is what we’ll do. If doing a BSkyB deal makes more sense in the U.K., that is what we’ll do. We are looking to let the market define where our brand resonates best and then go from there.
 
WS: HBO also produces original productions in Latin America and Central Europe. What is the strategy for locally produced series or movies or minis?
PLEPLER: Same answer, it’s a market-based question. We give great leeway to the individuals running those networks in those regions. If they think that the format rights to a show like In Treatment will work in Hungary, then they should do it. If in Latin America they think that there are shows that are particular to that region, and that make business sense, they should do that. We give a very decentralized embrace to our local managers to either look at format rights or originals that may make sense in their territories or countries, and let them decide, on top of using our own library of programs.
 
WS: In the many years you have been involved with HBO’s original programming, what have been the biggest surprises and the biggest satisfactions?
PLEPLER: I must say that the biggest satisfaction, to be honest, has been the rejuvenation of our creative culture that Mike and I have been so proud to lead in the last four-and-a-half years. After the success we had with The Sopranos and Sex and the City, people forgot what it is that brought us to the dance in the first place, which was listening for original voices, being brave enough to trust those voices, not looking for success but looking for quality and knowing that quality would eventually bring us success. We were very disciplined in returning to that core ideology together and embracing people in the creative community who, after all, are the way you get there. It’s been an enormously rewarding partnership for me with Mike, and our partnership with showrunners and talent, from Alan Ball (True Blood) to Terry Winter and Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire) and all the teams. It’s enormously gratifying. I think the surprise—I wouldn’t even use that word—the joy is in rediscovering that if you trust the artistic vision that brought us here in the first place, which we have done in the last four-and-a-half years, the audience will be there for you, the market will respond to excellence. You do not have to make television for the lowest common denominator either here or anywhere in the world. You can make quality television and there is a huge market for it and it’s deeply appreciated in the culture.