Chris Albrecht, the 49-year-old president of HBO original programming, is standing in the middle of his beige-toned corner office on the sun-drenched top floor of a Century City tower, surrounded by images of Sarah Jessica Parker.
Poster-sized photographs are propped up on every available piece of furniture, on window sills, even on the floor. There's a shot of Sex and the City's iconic heroine, Carrie Bradshaw, sitting primly on a park bench, tilting her pert chin to the sky with her best gamine smile (and pushing the sartorial edge with a tiara and white gloves). There's a flirty Carrie, kicking up a spiky Choo at a street-corner hot-dog stand; a pensive Carrie, gazing out from a telephone kiosk in a picture within a picture; and a glamorous Carrie, sparkling in a beaded dress, all burning eyes and glossy lips.
"We have to present these to SJ tomorrow," says Carolyn Strauss, Albrecht's deputy. Albrecht snaps to attention: "Then let's pick the four we like best, and let her choose from those. We don't want to draw this out." They both scan the photos in a slow circle and, almost in unison, point to the same four. "That one, that one, and those two," says Albrecht. "Definitely," says Strauss, adding, "I'm amazed SJ approved a photo of herself smiling." (Ultimately, when the photos are shown to the actress, pensive Carrie prevails.)
A few hours later, Albrecht is at the wheel of his gleaming white urban-safari vehicle. He's weaving his way through Beverly Hills traffic, riffing on the connection between Tony Soprano, Carl Jung, and horseback riding. Albrecht is passionate about all three. A compact man with alert eyes who favors sleek, open-collared suits, he exudes the casual intensity of a practiced deal maker. But despite the Mercedes G series SUV tricked out with a dashboard computer for rolling calls on the commute from his ranch in Malibu, he is hardly what you'd get if you called central casting for a network executive. (Funny, then, that as Fast Company went to press, he was promoted to the position of HBO's chairman and CEO.)
Albrecht is both slickly confident and openly curious. A fast-talking former stand-up comedian from Long Island, he is reflective in conversation. He takes an almost scholarly approach to the Jungian analysis that he has pursued for the past 10 years. "The idea that we're all connected in the collective unconscious is an extremely important part of what makes entertainment successful," he says. "You can't translate that literally, but you can be aware of the ideas behind it: that the psyche has a structure, that the unconscious is a very powerful force, that we're all on a journey, striving for individuation and wholeness. If you understand that, you have a better grip on what's relevant, resonant, and rich about human experience."
You also have what turns out to be an unparalleled formula for producing genuinely original and genuinely good television. Albrecht's instincts guide him to what is both robustly entertaining and rigorously human, from promotional photos to character development. But he isn't just a philosopher of television. Under his leadership, HBO's original-programming division has unleashed a creative juggernaut on the television landscape. By any measure, when it comes to original programming, Albrecht is the most original mind in television.
Sex and the City, which debuted in 1998, The Sopranos (1999), and Six Feet Under (2001) -- the "3Ses," in HBO shorthand -- are three of the biggest hits on TV. The shows draw prime-time-sized audiences (an average of around 12 million, 14 million, and 12 million viewers per episode, respectively) to a network that still reaches only one-quarter of all TV households. HBO regularly garners more Emmy nominations than the big-three broadcast networks and wins Golden Globes, Oscars, and Peabody Awards for its original series and movies in competition with the biggest players in Hollywood. At the 2001 Emmys, HBO got 94 nominations and won 16. No fewer than 20 winners thanked Albrecht personally from the stage. This year, HBO leads again with 93 nominations, 23 of them for Six Feet Under alone.
The Sopranos, veteran TV writer-producer David Chase's unstintingly original, unflinchingly real series about an angst-ridden New Jersey mob boss (played by James Gandolfini to be both repugnant and riveting) with two dysfunctional families, surged into the popular consciousness two years ago. Even if you haven't watched an episode, chances are that you know all about the show. The series has earned both highbrow acclaim and street-level props. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden declared the series "the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century," while a couple of lieutenants from the New Jersey DeCavalcante crime family were recorded on surveillance tapes raving about the show.
HBO's lineup is staggering in its depth and variety. Along with The Sopranos, Sex and the City (an antic mix of sex, shoes, restaurants, and relationships), and Six Feet Under (the darkly comic chronicles of a dysfunctional family of undertakers from Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball), other original series include Oz (a brutal, boundary-pushing prison drama), Curb Your Enthusiasm (a viciously funny, inventive comedy from Seinfeld producer Larry David), and the most recent critical hit, HBO's twisted take on a cop show, The Wire.
HBO's original programming is also responsible for such critically adored made-for-television movies as the Emmy-winning Wit (starring Emma Thompson and directed by Mike Nichols) and the virtuoso Path to War, with Michael Gambon as Lyndon B. Johnson, directed by John Frankenheimer. A colossal $120 million, 10-part miniseries, Band of Brothers (based on Stephen Ambrose's book and produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg), premiered on September 9, 2001 and drew a total audience of nearly 59 million people in the weeks following September 11. The documentary group has won a dozen Oscars in the past decade. Part of the secret is in the mix: Event films such as The Laramie Project and the Rudy Giuliani documentary, In Memorium: New York City, 9/11/01, coexist with such gritty, late-night fare as Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions.
It's a virtuoso blend of intelligence, emotion, and invention. And, as it turns out, even in the age of Big Brother 3, producing high-quality television is good business. With a 27 million subscriber base that is growing at a rate of approximately 1 million subscribers a year, HBO dwarfs Showtime, its closest pay-cable rival. HBO has posted an average of 20% earnings growth since 1995 and last year reported profits of $725 million on $2.6 billion in revenue.
Meanwhile, the network's slogan, "It's not TV. It's HBO," has morphed from being the cheeky handle of an upstart pay-cable channel into being a direct challenge to the broadcast networks. Technically speaking, HBO and the networks are not competitors. HBO sells itself to viewers; the networks sell viewers to advertisers. But broadcast networks, pay channels, and basic cable are all clamoring for attention in an increasingly cluttered, competitive, and fragmented entertainment marketplace. In a business where each home run is venerated as a pseudomiracle, HBO's almost uncanny ability to excite the popular imagination, elevate the audience's expectations, and deliver hits represents a radical victory. It changes the game for everyone.
The networks, naturally, have their push back. Some network executives dismiss HBO's success as a by-product of the trinity of vulgarity -- violence, graphic language, and sex -- that separates pay cable from the rest of the TV landscape. Most have circled their calendars to mark Sunday, September 15th at 9 PM: the long-awaited return of The Sopranos for its fourth season and one of the most competitive hours on television. All are scrambling to crack the formula for Soprano-esque hits.
Of course, when it comes to producing hits, Albrecht knows that the best formula is no formula at all. "When it comes to our creative philosophy, the good news is that we don't have any rules," he says. "The bad news is, we don't have any rules." What Albrecht and his team do have is a set of ruling values. Spend time with HBO's decision makers, and you'll hear the same questions over and over: "We just ask ourselves: Is it different? Is it distinctive? Is it good?" says Albrecht.
What's good? "The network guys have an objective criterion for making decisions about shows: Are they paying for themselves?" Albrecht says. "Because of the cable-distribution model, we have no idea whether a particular episode of The Sopranos or a miniseries event brought in more subscriptions. The only thing we have to go on is our own sensibility -- the gut."
That sensibility boils down to one principle, says Albrecht: "Ultimately, is it about something? By 'about something,' I mean not just about the subject, or the arena, or the location, but really about something that is deeply relevant to the human experience. Sopranos isn't about a Mob boss on Prozac. It's about a man searching for the meaning of his life. Six Feet Under isn't about a family of undertakers so much as it's about a group of people who have to deal with their feelings about death in order to get on with their own lives. The next question is, Is it the very best realization of that idea? Is it true to itself?"
It's a simple strategic insight that's easy to describe but exceedingly difficult to execute: Forget what's popular -- what's working now -- and start with what's good. Then ignore the conventions of the medium, and reject the received wisdom of the industry to follow the internal logic of each project. It's not a recipe for hits. It's a discipline for producing original work -- and for working productively with people who make stuff that makes a difference.
Albrecht and his team pull it off with a powerful combination of innovation, instincts, creative practices, and production values.
[Scene 1: "Fortunate Son," The Sopranos, season three]
TONY: All this from a slice of gabagool?
DR. MELFI: Kind of like Proust's madeleines.
TONY: What? Who?
DR. MELFI: Marcel Proust. Wrote a seven-volume classic, Remembrance of Things Past. He took a bite of a madeleine -- a kind of tea cookie he used to have when he was a child -- and that one bite unleashed a tide of memories of his childhood and ultimately, his entire life.
TONY: This sounds very gay. I hope you're not saying that.
"We decided to take the high road."
The Sopranos was the perfect storm of hits for HBO. The network, which started out broadcasting in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1972 as a pay channel that featured boxing, theatrical films, and stand-up comedy, had more than a decade of original programming under its belt. Some of it was groundbreaking: Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's campaign mockumentary Tanner '88 and Gary Shandling's celebrated send-up of a talk-show host, The Larry Sanders Show. Some was less inspiring: The original original program on HBO was a polka-festival special. Primed by Oz (1997) and Sex and the City (1998) -- and thirsty for quality in a vast sea of reality TV, game shows, and Law and Order spin-offs -- critics unleashed a frenzy of praise for The Sopranos.
The audience followed in numbers that put HBO, which doesn't compete on ratings, on par with some of the most successful shows on broadcast television. While The Sopranos doesn't reach the ratings stratosphere of the top three shows on TV (for the 2001 - 02 season, NBC's Friends, with an average of 24.5 million viewers; CBS's CSI, with 23.7 million; and NBC's ER, with 22.1 million), it does regularly match the top 10 or 15 shows, with an average of 14 million viewers per episode. What's extraordinary is that HBO draws its viewers from a 27 million - subscriber universe, while the potential audience for commercial networks is every U.S. household with a TV set.
More than the numbers, The Sopranos' impact on the cultural conversation has changed the game for HBO. Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television, at Syracuse University, considers The Sopranos to be "the best drama on television." Says Thompson: "The Sopranos put America on notice. HBO is the place where great television is made." It also put the networks on notice. (Hollywood may be the next venue: Albrecht recently said that a Sopranos film may follow on the heels of the TV series.)
Soprano envy ranged from griping about HBO's "short seasons" (David Chase produces 13 episodes, compared with the typical 24 episodes for a network's hour-long dramas) to rumblings about the show's graphic language, violence, and sexual content. The industry chatter peaked in April 2001 with an infamous memo distributed by NBC chairman and CEO (and vice chairman of parent company General Electric) Bob Wright. One episode from The Sopranos' third season climaxed in the brutal beating death of a stripper. Wright sent a tape of that episode to 50 NBC executives, studio heads, and producers. The accompanying memo called for colleagues to help NBC "think about an issue I believe is having a major impact on our business -- the nature of the content in HBO's The Sopranos." Wright went on, "It is a show we could not and would not air on NBC because of the violence, language, and nudity."
While Wright claimed that his motivation was simply to provoke thoughtful discussion about The Sopranos, the "interestingly worded letter," as Albrecht puts it, pointed to another agenda. "We were confused, amused, and somewhat aggravated by what seemed to be an effort to direct negative attention to our show," Albrecht says. "It also missed the point. It's a fundamental misreading of the audience to assume that the show's success is based on its graphic content. There's no gold mine at the end of the vulgar rainbow." Still, he says with a smile, "it's a valid question they're raising: How are we going to compete with this?"
To understand just how extraordinary that question is, you have to go back to 1995. After a decade of different leadership posts at HBO, Albrecht was the newly appointed president of original programming, and Jeff Bewkes had just taken over as HBO chairman and CEO in New York from the departing Michael Fuchs. (And at press time, Bewkes was promoted to chairman of AOL Time Warner's new Entertainment & Networks Group.) The extent of HBO's original programming was two half-hour comedies, Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show,, which the network touted as "the best hour of comedy on television." HBO programmers joked that they should have called it "the only hour on HBO." Albrecht and Bewkes called a two-day meeting of the executive committee and key original-programming execs. The question on the table: Are we really who we say we are? The answer came back: Not really. At least not yet.
"The words we always used to talk about ourselves were, 'different,' 'distinctive,' 'worth paying for,' 'better,' " says Albrecht. "In that meeting, we came to the conclusion that we weren't quite there yet, but that it was a great thing to strive for. The only way to move forward and win is to take chances and to be distinctive."
For years, "distinctive" at HBO meant nothing more than "not on network TV." Albrecht and Bewkes believed that if they wanted to produce bold, really distinctive television, they needed a new starting place. "If we wanted to be original, we couldn't shut anything out. We had to be open to everything. That was a big shift," says Bewkes. Once HBO turned the corner from counterprogramming the networks, the only important question was, "Is it good? Does it stand out for some reason? If we get much fancier than that, we're going to be in trouble," says Bewkes.
Rather than focusing on paying an altruistic service to the viewing public, HBO's single-minded devotion to quality is part of a bold strategy. "The more we can make original programming the basis of competition, the more of an advantage we'll have," says Bewkes. "It's something you can't buy. It's not a commodity bidding war among cable operators and pay networks. It requires a distinct capability." At the 1995 meeting, says Bewkes, the HBO leadership team decided to "jump fully off this cliff."
It was a big leap. The unit didn't have hoards of cash to invest in programming, and it had no way to measure return on investment for any particular show. They were venturing into fiercely competitive territory with a 90% failure rate. "It was a real mess," says Bewkes. "But we just said forget about it -- let's just do good stuff and we'll solve it later. We decided to take the high road."
Taking that path paid off. Today, HBO invests about $400 million annually in original programming in an increasingly competitive pay-cable landscape built around a new mix of original series, movies, and specials. Basic-cable channels have followed suit, from MTV, with Real World and The Osbournes, to Court TV, with special made-for-TV movies. But the advantage that really matters is HBO's creative edge. Bewkes admits that "going after creative hits is a funny business. Chris and I joke about this all the time. He says at the end of our phone conversations, 'Okay, we've figured it out. We're going to go make some hits.' I say, 'Great, you've got it. Go do it. Go make some hits!' "
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