What Happens After Winter Comes:HBO After Game of Thrones

I may be the only person in America this Sunday who doesn’t care who ends up sitting on the Iron Throne. (And judging from the chatter I’ve heard from certain circles, there are some loyal Game of Thrones fans that may have run out of patience with that in the final season.) The series has never really captured my interest, I think the Emmys have been ridiculously generous to it (the way they overloaded compared to the extraordinary final season of The Americans was particularly galling last year), and it’s rapidly becoming one of the most overrated series in history. What I do care about, and no doubt there are dozens of network honchos who feel the same, is what will happen to HBO after May 19^th.

History may be a guide to us, because HBO has been in this exact situation before.  At the dawn of the new millennium, HBO was the forerunner – and for a long time, the only place – where one could find some of the great series of the revolution. But in 2007, it was starting to look like its run was over. Six Feet Under was gone. The cancellation of Deadwood and the fallout from the why was a big blow to the network. The Wire was about to begin its final season. And The Sopranos – the series that had built the network had literally faded to black. What’s more, other networks were filling the void that HBO was leaving. FX has revolutionized basic cable with The Shield, Showtime, its poorer cousin for many years, was stunning the world with Dexter, and AMC was about to change the conversation again with Mad Men.  HBO didn’t look like it had anything in its coffers to replace it.

But the network would be saved from oblivion from a series that came out of a blood soaked, overly sexual, incest filled series of books. I speak, of course, about Alan Ball’s True Blood based off Charlayne Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse adventures.  Never considered an exceptional series critically – its single Emmy nomination in 2010 always smacked of tokenism to me – it nevertheless managed to find a huge audience, albeit nowhere near as big as The Sopranos at its peak.

However, the cushion of True Blood’s success allowed HBO to go about experimenting in ways it hadn’t done since Oz had debuted. In that same period came In Treatment, an intriguing series which followed a psychiatrist played by Gabriel Byrne and the patients he saw week after week ( HBO could never quite find the way to air properly; in retrospect, it reads like an early Netflix series)  Big Love, one of the rare HBO productions that was underrated by the Emmys, Bored to Death, an intriguing dramedy that among its other virtues continued Ted Danson’s late career renaissance, and Boardwalk Empire, a series that started out like gangbusters, and due to problems behind the scenes, never quite achieved the greatness it could have. None of these series emerged as smashes, but they did show that HBO was still playing at a high level, and one can argue that this kind of experimentation was what let the executives to greenlight Game of Thrones in the first place.

And having a smash like Game of Thrones has allowed HBO to experiment again. Not all of their stories have been successes, but they have allowed for just brilliant creations as True Detective (the first and third seasons anyway), The Leftovers and Westworld. The comedies have always been rather consistent, but they’ve also created such intriguing offerings as Barry, Insecure, and Getting On. They haven’t all been successes, but at least these shows have given HBO room to grow.

The key is not to make the mistakes of AMC and put your entire future on a single franchise. They’ve already greenlit one Game of Thrones prequel series, and there are rumors that are at least three more.  Prequel series are always risky – for every Better Call Saul, you get The Carrie Diaries – and depending on how Game of Thrones ends, the fan base may not be as wild to go back to Westeros.  And eventually, you have to go to something new, besides relying on formulas. One doesn’t want to end up like NBC reliant on the whims of Dick Wolf.

There are signs that HBO is looking to the future, and that is a good sign. Getting past the muck that was series like Veep is always a good idea. But don’t stake your entire future on a single franchise. Otherwise, you will be in for a long, cold winter.