Apple TV+ courts Richard Plepler, the HBO exec who championed Game of Thrones

Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service, launched yesterday to fans so eager for its content everyone was having connection problems. About a week before that, Apple launched its own streaming service, Apple TV+, to less fanfare. Although its original shows have been getting middling reviews, but Apple is determined to make this work. And with billions of dollars in the war chest — this is Apple we’re talking about — they have the resources to keep fighting for the top spot as long as they want.

And they’re looking to hire some top-tier talent to help them do that. Deadline reports that Apple is working out a development deal with Richard Plepler, a former HBO executive who was instrumental in bringing shows like True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom and Game of Thrones to the screen. He was the guy who saw something in the show and let showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss reshoot the legendarily disastrous pilot episode, and the rest is TV history.

Plepler was with HBO in some form or another for 25 years, became co-president in 2007 and CEO in 2012. He had a huge hand in turning HBO into the powerhouse network it is today. And yet, he left earlier this year. Why? It may have something to do with AT&T buying HBO’s parent company and consolidating it into a new group called WarnerMedia. When anything involving Plepler comes up, I’m always reminded of a 2018 town hall meeting where AT&T exec John Stankey told 150-odd HBO employees his vision for the future of the network. “We need hours a day,” he said. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.”

Then there was this awkward on-stage interaction between Plepler and Stankey:

"Stankey: “[W]e’ve got to make money at the end of the day, right?”Plepler: “We do that.”Stankey: “Yes, you do. Just not enough.”"

Half a year later, Plepler was gone. “Hard as it is to think about leaving the company I love, and the people I love in it, it is the right time for me to do so,” he wrote. “So many of you, and many others before us, have made HBO a cultural and business phenomenon.”

I think Plepler left because he was uncomfortable with AT&T’s focus on quantity of content. But his more boutique vision of entertainment might have a place at Apple, which is eager to claim some territory in the streaming wars. Everyone is looking for “the next Game of Thrones.” Wouldn’t it be a trip if Plepler found it for Apple, using his patented easy-does-it approach the corporate overlords at his old network no longer found palatable?

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