HBO is the Titanic of the cable entertainment network world, heading for the Big Iceberg In the Sky. Its loss of The Sopranos is the observable part of the iceberg. The nine-tenths underwater was Chris Albrecht, the captain of the ship until he was pushed overboard in May. The widely respected CEO made a splash of himself by allegedly beating up a girl friend in the MGM Grand parking lot at 3 AM. Police said he allegedly had hands around her neck so tightly, they had to physically break the grip to free her. It was a scene right out of The Sopranos.
Jeff Bewkes, soon to be the emperor-in-chief of the Time Warner Empire, says we have nothing to worry about. The current Time Warner president announced the other day he has appointed four longtime HBO lieutenants -- Bill Nelson, Richard Plepler, Eric Kessler, and Harold Akselrad -- to serve as co-captains, replacing Albrecht at the helm.
I'm worried anyway. They are rearranging the deck chairs at a time when the ship needs a change of direction. The new leaders are the team that got HBO in the hole.
I pay $15 a month for HBO and don't watch anything. I have six HBO channels with a lot of movies I didn't want to see in movie theatres, now I have a chance to not want to see them at home.
True, I'm only one of the 30 million subscribers who contribute to the profit of $1.2 billion on a $3.4 billion in revenue last year. But I could tell they were in trouble when I even stopped watching The Sopranos this season.
The everybody-in-the-life-boats warning for me was catching the first episode of the much-heralded successor to The Sopranos, David Milch's John From Cincinnati. Watching a frog in the pond was more rivet, riveting. Could this be the same David Milch who created Deadwood five years ago?
A reprise of Chris Albrecht fighting that woman in the parking lot would be more interesting. In fact, Albrecht against any woman could be a series more entertaining than some of the fights of the century on HBO's Friday night fight night.
What is happening at HBO is what happened to NBC in the post-Friends years. It had been the Must See Network until the GE geniuses picked Jeff Zucker to captain the ship. A distinguished news executive, Zucker moved himself to Hollywood where he suddenly thought Fear Factor was great entertainment.
Instead of going straight ahead on red into the iceberg, what I would do is dig deeper into HBO's past. I'd bring back Michael Fuchs, without whom Jeff Bewkes wouldn't have been possible.
Holder of quadruple reins of president, chief operating office, chief executive officer and chairman of the board by 1984, Fuchs was Mr. HBO. In 1995, he got into a titanic power struggle with Gerry Levin, who ran a corporation that had made the Byzantine Empire seem like an open society. Rather than fight with a man who he considered the leading airhead of the communications world, Fuchs strapped on a golden parachute worth more than the GNP of some Third World nations, and left it all to Jeff Bewkes.
Everything that we know as "It's not TV; it's HBO" began under Fuchs.
"Time Warner wanted me to do tits and asses," Fuchs told me as he was walking out the door. They warned him, "Don't get clever." Well, he got cleaver and changed the cable industry.
Fuchs was the man who invented TV movies of substance at the time when commercial networks were afraid to do it ("Barbarians at the Gate"). When cable meant all you had to do as a programmer was give them some tits and dirty words, Fuchs did that crunchy stuff that we have come to admire in HBO movies.
He was the one who invented alternative comedy, daring stuff at the time, like Dream and The Larry Sanders Show.
He was the one who kept stand-up comedy alive on TV. Every modern comic owes him a debt of gratitude. He saved Dennis Miller's and Bill Maher's careers.
Fuchs innovated in bringing live concerts to HBO (Diana Ross, Johnny Cash, Gladys Knight & the Pips).
He was the first to do the cutting edge documentaries HBO is now famous for. And he introduced realism, real reality TV.
He gave cable a reason for being.
As the generalissimo of HBO, he pushed Time Warner into films made for theatrical release. Also into investing in C-SPAN, Comedy Central, and E! Entertainment.
Perhaps his greatest contribution to the art of television programming was not having deadlines for shows. He did not force them to be ready on the first day of the so- called fall TV season, like commercial networks. So HBO series did not have to go on the air still unfinished with the stuff that has given commercial TV its good name (insert laugh track here).
"In the old days when you wanted to make money," Fuchs delivered a state of the art message for me, "the only way to do it was excel. Now you don't even have to excel. We're making so much fuckin' money, after awhile nobody cares. Now it's don't make waves."
Michael Fuchs was a wave maker.
He made all the right moves until 1995 when he ran into the Levin wind machine. First, he got pushed out of Time Warner then Warner Music where he made a lot of enemies by firing Warner Music Group icons (Doug Morris, Danny Goldberg).
Fuchs suddenly disappeared from the radar screen. When last heard from, he was hunting buffalo with his good friend, Ted Turner, another wave maker who escaped scathed from the Time Warner fiascos of the 1990's. Fuchs also invested his billions in the Internet (including a car buying site, Auto-By-Tel).
He was an arrogant, full of braggadocio and himself, vociferous, a troublemaker. That's what HBO needed in its early days and still needs. I bet Fuchs could be lured back to finish his job at HBO and make the pay cable network "Not HBO TV, but HBO!"
But what do I know? I'm only a critic.
