Thursday, April 18, 2019

Life After Game of Thrones?

What will HBO do once Game of Thrones airs its finale in May? (Hell, what will the rest of us do?) Well, as Yohana Desta explains, the pay cabler mostly intends to stick with business as usual: banking big on major talent, without flooding the zone with a surge of new programming. In a series of interviews with various outlets, the network has begun to lay out its plans for the A.W. (that’s “After Westeros”) period. The general gist: “We’re trying to do good shows, not necessarily hit a number, and I think a little bit of determining that number will be shows that we think are worthy, and can we deliver to a creator the experience that people have come to expect working at HBO? We don’t want to lose that,” HBO programming chief Casey Bloys told Deadline. “We don’t want the volume to get too high that people feel like they’re lost in the shuffle.” His comments echo what one former HBO executive told Vanity Fair in 2018, when HBO’s new corporate parent, AT&T, was inspiring some anxiety among industry insiders. “You can’t turn HBO into a superstore overnight,” they said. HBO projects “take a very, very long time to gestate and to get right . . . If they really do want to fill the schedule it will take two years—at least—of serious, hardcore, amped-up development to get material that’s right.”
Elsewhere in HWD, Joanna Robinson chats with Game of Thrones star John Bradley about a certain “psychopathic” Westeros resident; K. Austin Collinsresponds to Donald Glover’s secret movie with a shrug; Laura Bradley goes behind the scenes of South Korean sensation BTS’s big S.N.L. debut; and we wonder whether a long-gestating adaptation of Y: The Last Manwill ever get off the ground.