HBO CEO Richard Plepler on the future of HBO after Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is ending after its next season. (Pause for sobs.) With the show having been such a huge hit for HBO, people are wondering how the network will adjust when its golden goose stops laying eggs. Bloomberg Businessweek asked HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler about the company’s future, and it turns out that he’s not worried.

“We have this embarrassment of riches where every Friday in our company we know of something exciting from the creative world that we didn’t know about on Monday,” Plepler said, employing the same phraseology to describe the Game of Thrones prequel scripts a while back. In short, he’s not concerned that the company is going to run out of ideas because everybody and their second cousin is bringing them new ones.

"[T]he line at our door is huge. Whether it’s five prequel ideas from different artists on Thrones. Whether it’s Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s fantastic show about the media business. Or the next season of True Detective, the next season of Big Little Lies, whether it’s Lovecraft Country, Misha Green’s extraordinary script, which is a kind of horror genre film set in the 1950s, or Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s new idea loosely based on the movie but with Damon’s extraordinary take. I’m not concerned about it at all, because the enormity of talent that wants to work at HBO is larger today than ever. So the thing that’s so exciting, if you’re in our chairs, is that you see that line forming. That’s what gives us the confidence to know that the next great show and the next great idea is waiting out there."

“Our job,” he continued, “is to make sure we pick right and choose right and work with the right people, but that’s actually a high-class problem because of the talent that we have who are excited about being part of the network.”

That Watchmen show could go either way…But in any case, I think this is a good attitude. HBO has built a reputation based on not only finding great talent, but then standing back and letting it do its thing. Plepler sounds like he wants to continue this tradition.

Plepler was named as co-president in charge of programming at HBO back in 2007, after Sex and the City — one of HBO’s defining hits — had ended, and as The Sopranos was coming to an end. At the time, relates Plepler, the company had become a little complacent, relying on what it thought was a “secret sauce. And I think we lost a little bit of our insurgent voice, which we had brought to the dance for so many years.”

"The job of my colleagues and myself was to refocus on that insurgent voice, to trust the writers who were coming in with new ideas. I remember saying over and over again in 2007, “There’ll never be another Sopranos. What there’ll be is the next terrific show. And let’s just go back to our essence, which was trusting the voice of great artists and auteurs who have a vision for what they want that show to be.” And in came Alan Ball with True Blood, and Lena Dunham with Girls, and Armando Iannucci with Veep, and Mike Judge and Alec Berg with Silicon Valley. And these two guys, of course, who had never done television before, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who had this idea to adapt George R.R. Martin’s books.”"

I love Plepler’s take on the end of The Sopranos: that there’ll never be another show like it, but there will be other great ideas. With Amazon looking like it’s trying to ride Game of Thrones’ coattails with a Lord of the Rings show, that’s refreshing to hear.

LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 06: (L-R) HBO CEO Richard Plepler and writer/producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff attend the 17th annual AFI Awards at Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on January 6, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI)

And how does Plepler feel about competitors like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon entering the premium space and trying to steal HBO’s market share? Typically, he’s okay with it.

"First of all, I’ve never thought that this was a zero-sum game. I’ve never believed that because The Crown is a good show on Netflix, that somehow diminishes Westworld or Big Little Lies or True Detective. It doesn’t. It just means there’s an additive amount of quality out in the landscape. Our job is to play our game, continue to deliver on what we do…The line at our door today in the fall of 2017, is longer than it was five years ago and much longer than it was 10 years ago. For us, the metric is quality, and if we adhere to that, talent recognizes it, and it becomes a virtuous cycle."

You can read more of the interview, wherein Plepler shares his views on HBO’s commitment to cord-cutting and the rash of sexual misconduct scandals currently rocking Hollywood, here. It’s an interesting take on the industry from one of its leaders.

Next: Season 8 filming: The Unsullied prepare for battle, and closer looks at the sets

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