Max Casualties

Welcome to February and another edition of Buffering, where I continue to monitor my inbox on the off chance Byron Allen would like to offer me a nice takeover deal, too. (I was a big fan of Real People back in the day if that helps, Mr. Allen.) This week in the newsletter we’re taking a look at the latest wave of cancellations over at Max, where no fewer than three well-reviewed shows bit the dust within the space of a few weeks last month. Both my Twitter replies and my Slacks here at work were lit up with folks asking me what exactly was going down and whether Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was back on his … nonsense. While one should never underestimate the lengths to which Mr. Zaslav will go to make his bottom line look bigger, I don’t think what happened in January represents some new effort to downsize the streamer. Read on for an explanation.

(By the way, one correction from last week: I said that the WWE’s SmackDown! would be coming to Netflix next year. While that show will be seen on the streamer in some countries outside the United States, here in America, we’ll be getting weekly doses of WWE’s Raw.)

–Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email buffering@vulture.com.


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The opening weeks of 2024 have been tough for fans of Max originals. Since the start of the year, the streaming home of HBO has handed out cancellation notices to three sophomore shows (Rap Sh!t, Our Flag Means Death, Julia) and confirmed that it has no plans to make a third season of The Flight Attendant, the Kaley Cuoco drama which last took off in May 2022. Meanwhile, former Max original Minx got its second cancellation in as many years when Starz, which picked up rights to the show in late 2022, decided not to move forward with more episodes.

But as intense as this winter’s flurry of cancellations has been, insiders say this is not the sequel to the 2022 Sudden Departure, when dozens of titles permanently disappeared from the platform then known as HBO Max. So what exactly is going on?

Well, some of this is just a coincidence of timing. Among the four shows still on Max, Rap Sh!t, Our Flag, and Julia all aired second seasons during the last quarter of 2023, and Max execs simply waited until they had enough weeks of data before making a call (and perhaps wanted to spare producers any bad news over the holidays). In the case of The Flight Attendant, star Kaley Cuoco issued a statement saying she simply always thought of the show “as a limited series” and THR reported that while the streamer was willing to consider a third season, Cuoco didn’t want to return; it’s likely news of all this leaked out last month because reporters pressured the streamer to confirm what so many in the industry had known for months. And as for Minx, well, Max doesn’t own the underlying IP and execs therefore have no control over programming decisions made by Starz.

But while the “why now?” part of this story is pretty straightforward, the answer to the “why cancel at all?” question — and the matter of what it means for Max’s future programming plans — is a bit more layered. For one thing, it’s important to keep in mind that all of the shows canceled last month were originally put into development in either2019 orearly2020, at a very different moment in the TV industry. Back then, Max Originals were overseen by the streamer’s original launch team of Bob Greenblatt and Kevin Reilly. The duo, who were pushed out just months after HBO Max’s summer 2020 launch, had been charged with a radical expansion of scripted content for the nascent streamer and followed through on that mandate by commissioning dozens of scripted and unscripted shows; dramatically expanding HBO’s modest family and kids’ programming footprints; and even greenlighting big-budget made-for-Max feature films. This of course resulted in the company taking on billions of dollars in debt, something which might have been sustainable (like it was for many years at Netflix) had Wall Street not decided two years ago that it was no longer cool with legacy companies bleeding red ink in pursuit of streaming subscribers.

This change in investor sentiment, combined with slowing subscriber growth at most streamers, was a big reason for the aforementioned 2022 content purge implemented by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The exec decided he needed to stop the financial hemorrhaging at Max and figure out a new path forward where the streamer actually made money. You can take issue with how went about implementing that course-change, as well as his decisions to keep paying himself tens of millions of dollars every year and throw a fancy party at Cannes in the middle of a writers’ strike even as those below him get laid off and projects get put on ice for tax savings. But the path laid out early on during the Greenblatt-Reilly era simply wasn’t sustainable. And given other streamers ended up slashing budgets and pulling titles from their platforms, Zaslav’s solution to his financial woes certainly wasn’t unique.

Still, it is also too simplistic to say these January cancellations are merely a by-product of the overall reset in streaming. After all, Max is still making original series, and handing out greenlights to new projects. But as part of the broader Zaslav reset at Warner Bros. Discovery, the company last year decided to change the creative direction for its Max Originals, and focus mostly on series attached to big, broad IP owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, like the upcoming DC-branded The Penguin or the Harry Potter series now in the works. And eventually, according to company insiders I’ve talked to in recent months, the new direction could also broaden out to include procedural franchises produced by sister company Warner Bros. TV, like a John Wells-produced medical drama — stuff that back in the day might have aired on TNT. But what’s not in the works at Max are shows like Julia or Rap Sh!t.

Folks who are convinced Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery are hell-bent on abandoning HBO’s prestige brand will take this as proof their fear is well-founded. But this strategic shift actually isn’t evidence of that at all. Keep in mind that even when Max was called “HBO Max,” the plan outlined by Reilly and Greenblatt was to make Max originals feel very different — broader, more basic-cable-like, more female-skewing — than the kinds of shows made by HBO. Remember, the cringey launch tagline for HBO Max was “It’s HBO… and so much more,” and a big part of the “so much more” was supposed to be the very different Max originals. And while Reilly made good on the promise with series such as the Gossip Girl reboot or F*Boy Island, he also greenlit a lot of titles that felt like they could have fit nicely on the linear HBO schedule — including, yes, the three shows which just got the ax. “Kevin and Bob, but especially Kevin, really wanted to do HBO kind of stuff,” one industry insider familiar with all the players at the company explains. “And that’s why you didn’t get many things that were broadening out from HBO. You got things that were adjacent to HBO, things like Hacks and Julia and Our Flag Means Death. The idea was for there to be more of a distinction between different offerings for Max: Here’s HBO, here’s library content, here’s some kind of broader procedurals or tentpole stuff.” The execution of that idea, however, resulted in a lot of shows that would’ve been right at home on HBO proper.

And yet, Reilly’s successor overseeing Max — HBO and Max content CEO Casey Bloys — didn’t just come in and abandon all of these HBO-esque projects. In fact, he handed out second seasons to the shows killed last month in the hope that positive critical reaction to their first seasons would result in bigger audiences for them. (As one personal familiar with the situation puts it, “A good show is a good show.”) The problem is, according to industry insiders, that ratings growth didn’t come. Worse, there also weren’t any signs shows such as Julia or Our Flag Means Death were poised to join the awards season conversation.

And then there was the final strike against last month’s canceled trio of titles: their production costs. As noted earlier, all three series went into development circa 2019/2020, at a time when competition for hot new shows was beyond intense. Streamers were handing out ridiculous deals in order to land coveted projects and agreeing to license fees and production budgets that were usually only reserved for big, established blockbuster hits. So a series like Rap Sh!t, which had the feel of an indie production and used iPhones to tell its story, ended up costing Max twice as much to license as HBO’s critically-loved, niche comedy Somebody Somewhere, per a source familiar with show budgets. Our Flag Means Death, the same sources say, had a license fee three times that of Somebody. “You had two niche shows being produced at double and triple the amount of another, more successful niche show that actually was an AFI best series winner,” the industry insider says. “A show has got to work from a price perspective, too. And I think the mistake they made in setting up these shows back when everything was like, ‘Oh, do whatever you want,’ is that that isn’t how HBO makes its smaller shows.” Indeed, while House of the Dragon has a huge budget to match its big audience, smaller comedies and dramas set up for the network, while by no means made on the cheap, historically have production costs in line with their expected audiences. Even during the Peak TV era, HBO execs worked hard, when possible, to ensure production budgets remained in line with ratings expectations.

None of this is to suggest the producers of these shows were irresponsible in their spending or went way over budget. Indeed, in the case of Rap Sh!t, the producers managed to reduce the budget for season two a bit, one source tells Vulture. But the reality is, “Those shows were set up to be incredibly expensive, and there is no reason they had to [cost] that much,” the industry insider says. “But once something is going, it’s hard to kind of undo.” And that ultimately was the problem facing Bloys and his team: These series were all creatively strong shows with passionate viewers, but the size of their viewership was out of line with the amount of money the platform was spending on them — and the license fees for third seasons likely would’ve been even bigger. Worse, in addition to modest audience size, the series didn’t really break through with awards voters and, in the case of something like Julia, didn’t even generate a ton of media coverage. “All of these shows, if they were set up more smartly, there could have been a different conversation about their futures,” the person familiar with Max’s decision-making process said. “Not every show has to be a blockbuster, but you have to go in [with a budget] that matches your expectation for a show. That’s not about David Zaslav; that’s just television 101.”

This explains why Max has (so far) continued to support a few shows greenlit during the early days of the streamer. Hacks is currently in production for its third season because in addition to strong viewership, including ratings growth between seasons, the series has also gotten nominated for Emmys and other awards. Similarly, Sex Lives of College Girls, produced efficiently by Warner Bros. TV, will also be back for a third season because it is reaching more viewers than shows like Our Flag Means Death while being “significantly cheaper” to make, per a person familiar with the budgets. And while it’s certainly not cheap, Sex and the City spin-off And Just Like That… has been a ratings hit for Max (while also proving to be a godsend to the Takes Economy).

Still, despite some of these holdovers, there’s no doubt that Max Originals are changing course and that a few years from now, the content mix on the Max platform will feel different than it did two or three years ago at the peak of Peak TV. But Max remains the home of HBO-branded programming, and that network’s development team is still chugging along with the same general mandate it’s always had. Yes, HBO has also had its share of cancellations lately: Winning Time departed after two seasons, and The Idol flopped after one. But such setbacks are not at all unusual for HBO, which has always had creative bets that didn’t pay off.

It also isn’t surprising that HBO’s overall output has started to slow down a bit in the last year or two. After all, for most of the linear era, HBO only programmed original scripted series on Sunday nights, including some weeks where there were zero drama or comedy shows in rotation. The network did increase the size of its portfolio in the late 2010s, even adding new shows on Monday, in part because Peak TV competition sort of demanded all platforms up their game a bit; FX similarly increased its greenlight count five or so years ago. But where HBO seems to be headed now appears to be in line with its normal output, leaving room in the overall Max budget for Max originals and the unscripted content being programmed by Discovery Networks brands.

And that seems to be the right place for a general entertainment streamer like Max. Much the same way Hulu has a mix of premium content (FX originals, shows like Only Murders in the Building) and populist fare (all things Kardashian), Max needs to balance its programming to reach different sets of subscribers. Early on, the Max content portfolio was heavy on HBO-ish fare, and as much as that pleased TV critics and fans of HBO, it didn’t do nearly enough to juice subscriptions or generate viewership (which matters because Max, unlike HBO, is in the advertising business). Worse, it cost a lot of money to make.

The trick for Max going forward will be to keep making enough premium, specialized fare to keep its core HBO audience happy while investing the right amount of money in projects (and news and sports content) to serve folks who have no interest in shows like White Lotus or Somebody Somewhere. As one industry insider puts it, “The question always is, what’s the right mix to bring people in and to keep them engaged?”

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