Essentially he came in and took over. Now the reason this has been cause for concern is his pedigree which was previously running Discovery where he oversaw its full conversion into a reality TV mill. He merged this new Discovery with Warner and the thing that has most people worried is with this comes HBO which for a long time has been a bastion of the highest quality TV. Renaming the streaming service from HBO Max to Max shows where his intentions are. Maybe you’ll tune into House of Dragons then finish the night with F Boy Island. Maybe tomorrow you just watch F Boy Island and they can stop spending big money on prestige TV. That’s the end game anyway. HBO generally worked because there were people at the top fighting and greenlighting the best stuff. It’s quite likely we’ll be seeing less and less of that in the near future.
It seems like a similar play when thr Sci-fi channel changed their name to SyFy and canceled the greatest science fiction shows and replaced them with Wrestling and ghost-hunting reality TV to save money.
The Discovery Merger saddled HBO with the debt from the purchase of HBO, and removing Expensive scripted shows with costly actors is a way to save money. As well as closing series to take the losses as tax deductions for the future.
I know they screwed over Cartoon Network pretty badly. Closed its main studios and merged it with Warner Bros. Animation, and season 2 of Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart was practically done and they sold the franchise as a tax write-off, if I recall.
The most controversial write-off in general however was Coyote vs. ACME, the backlash WBD got for trying to sell that off got them to actually reverse their decision.
A hack who continues to fail upwards. A proponent of cheap reality/tabloid programming who was handed the reins to HBO and TCM.
He is someone that can easily make something bad even worse. I bet he can even do it in his sleep.
