Few brands in TV enjoy as consistently positive a reputation as HBO. Sure, the premium cable network throws up the occasional flop like anybody else, but the channel that helped inaugurate the whole concept of “the golden age of television” continues to post many of TV’s most critically and commercially successful projects with notable regularity. While the functionality of many of the brand in Warner Bros. Discovery’s portfolio runs somewhere between “semi-” to “dys-,” HBO remains a pretty obvious outlier, and one of the big gets for whichever rival company ends up snatching up all or part of the company and ramming it down its gullet.
Netflix, for its part, is swearing not to screw up this particular golden goose too badly. Executives from the streamer—which currently is in pole position to buy large portions of WBD, provided Paramount doesn’t sue and complain its way into making the acquisition itself—gave an interview this week where they made it clear that, regardless of what other changes Netflix makes if/when the sale goes through, they know enough to not mess with president Casey Bloys’ empire of Actually Good TV.
“We’re going to keep that HBO team,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters—i.e., “the one who’s not Ted Sarandos”—said in an interview with Stratechery this week. (Peters is, per THR, doing a bit of a press tour at the moment, possibly in response to Wall Street making unhappy noises about the company’s big acquisition plans.) “That HBO team is good at working with that talent and giving them the environment that they need to tell those amazing stories and they get to do it under a great brand that speaks to the kind of program they’re trying to make, and we’re going to give them a bigger audience.”
Of course, it’s worth noting that Peters is talking here about HBO personnel, and not the brand’s actual offerings—and, specifically, whether HBO Max will continue to exist as a separate service, or be smooshed into the existing Netflix. (He notes that one of the reasons Netflix thinks Warner Bros. is a good fit for their company is that the much larger streamer also has much better international reach, existing in markets like India where HBO Max currently has to rely on Disney’s JioStar to distribute its content.) When asked point-blank about whether HBO Max would continue to exist separately, Peters would only say, “This is the kind of thing we would want to sort out.”
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