How HGTV Swallowed HBO

2023/08/25 23:03

Max is stripping back its prestige offerings and going big on shows like “House Hunters”—a shift decades in the making.

The story of twenty-first-century TV, as it is often told, begins with Sex and the City and The Sopranos. All the antiheroes and high production values and complex plots and “sexposition” and “bottle” episodes, all the recaps and the recappers and the subscription streamers and the movie actors taking on TV roles and the TV writers pretending their shows are “visual novels” or “10-hour movies” and Tom and Shiv and Teddy Perkins and the “bad fans” and the Reddit threads and all that sweet, sweet prestige—it begins with what HBO decided to do right around the end of the twentieth century.

https://newrepublic.com/article/175048/hgtv-swallowed-hbo...