Programming chief Casey Bloys on HBO’s post-Game of Thrones future

HBO programming president Casey Bloys didn’t watch the Game of Thrones series finale back when it aired in May, on account of him already having seen it so many times during the lead-up. “You could see the debate starting,” Bloys said of the extremely divided response to the episode, talking to The Ringer. “And the debate has subsided. But it’ll probably go on for ages.”

That’s probably a huge understatement from Bloys, but he’s in the business of things going on for ages. After working at HBO for years, he scored the job of programming president in 2016, when Game of Thrones was already winding down. “I was lucky enough to work with [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss],” he said, “but the show was already what it was.” While Bloys would have been happy to have more seasons of Thrones, it wasn’t his way to interfere with the creative direction of shows, so he turned his attention towards developing potential replacements. “Sometimes, when there’s a show that big, it can confine you to an extent,” he mused. “You start to get afraid: What if this isn’t the next Game of Thrones? That can paralyze you. So one of the things I wanted to do was be prepared for when Game of Thrones ended … and so 2019 was a very deliberate plan that had been in place for several years. A very deliberate attempt to replenish the slate.”

Looking back at the year, it looked like Bloys succeeded. Of course, nothing was as big as Thrones, and Bloys never expected it to be. “Once you kind of accept that not everything is going to be Game of Thrones, between that and also having more resources to do more, by definition, you have to try more,” he said. But he did spearhead several shows that generated a lot of buzz and found audiences, including Chernobyl, Euphoria, The Righteous Gemstones and Watchmen, plus the second seasons of Big Little Lies and Succession, both of which proved bigger than the first. HBO may not have a hit the size of Game of Thrones anymore, but it clearly hasn’t lost its knack for making quality, buzz-worthy programming.

Part of that success can be attributed to the way Bloys works, which basically amounts to picking the right projects and letting the creatives do their thing. “Generally speaking, the creators we’re in business with are wildly talented, creative people,” Bloys said. “So there’s a pretty good shot that if there’s something that is getting someone excited, we’re going to be excited as well.”

The creators seem to respect Bloys’ approach, too. “I just can’t overpraise the way that HBO runs their creative side,” said Alec Berg, an executive producer on Silicon Valley and Barry. “I mean, it genuinely sounds like I’m being a corporate shill, but … I hear rumblings about how companies are promising certain things and then getting into the calling the balls and strikes with stuff, and that just doesn’t happen at HBO. It just doesn’t.” Craig Mazin, the guy behind Chernobyl, agreed. “I wanted to make something that would care enough about the audience to entertain them and grip them, while doing something that we all felt was important,” Mazin said. “And [Casey] got that. … We just had a meeting of the minds.”

“I do feel lucky to have come up under this culture where you spend what it takes,” said Bloys. “You go out of your way to spend for talent. You do things that maybe if you were at a company that only cared about the bottom line you wouldn’t do. But the emphasis on talent and treating talent well, I think, ultimately serves everybody well. It makes them feel good. It makes them want to work here. Other people see that we treat talent well. And then they want to work here. It seems very obvious,” he says. “It seems like, why wouldn’t you do that? But I do realize it’s a specific culture within HBO.”

Honestly, reading this kind of thing puts me at ease thinking about HBO’s future. It sounds like Bloys has the right ideas about pretty much everything, but he has to worry about more than just maintaining the network’s reputation for quality. He also has to do it while dealing with a new corporate overlord in AT&T. AT&T’s more hands-on management style is reportedly why longtime HBO CEO Richard Plepler left the company early in 2019. Reportedly, the telecom giant wants HBO to produce more content so it will be more competitive with the likes of Netflix and Disney+. Is Bloys prepared for that challenge?

By the sound of it, Bloys isn’t bothered by the changes at all. According to WarnerMedia head Bob Greenblatt, he was itching to make more shows anyway. “We had spent a lot of money,” Bloys said. “And luckily AT&T, when they came in said, ‘Great. We bless that spending.’ There was a feeling at first that it was like, ‘Oh, we’re really busy,’” Bloys says. “And I try to say people, ‘This isn’t an isolated time. This is our new normal.’”

So Bloys is taking this is stride, too, but there are yet more changes ahead, like WarnerMedia rolling out HBO Max, its new streaming service. The potential for confusion is high, since although HBO Max will feature HBO shows, it’s not HBO. HBO Now, the network’s current over-the-top streaming service, will still be a thing. Executives are hoping that any confusion works itself out after HBO Max comes out in May, but it could still be dicey.

As far as Bloys is concerned, he’s keeping his head down and doing what he’s always done. “I don’t want to get too distracted and lose sight of the fact that the number-one thing I can do is keep up the shows that live up to the HBO brand,” he said. “I am competitive … [but] I do think, to some extent, our biggest challenge is living up to what HBO has done in the past and continuing that.”

And not everything is going to change. While Netflix and Amazon have changed the streaming game by dumping every episode of a new season all at once so people can binge, Bloys is sticking by the release-one-episode-a-week format, something that Disney+ has also adopted. “I am a huge, huge proponent of week-to-week viewing,” he said. “It’s funny—when Netflix came out, I think the whole industry said, ‘Oh my gosh, should we be doing this?’ But I’ve come out very firmly on the side of a weekly release pattern. … You have an entire industry of people writing about TV and criticizing TV and obsessing about TV. To feed that once a week and to have people comment on it, and hate on it and love it is a lot. … You want people talking about your shows. You want people debating your shows. You want people having an opinion of your shows.”

I could not agree more with him, by the way, provided that the shows are worth talking about and debating, something else Bloys is mindful of. Quantity of shows isn’t enough, especially at HBO. “You have to do interesting shows that people do want to talk about.”

That brings us to 2020, the new year, where HBO will continue to debut a bunch of buzzworthy new shows (Avenue 5, from Veep creator Armando Iannucci; Run, from Phoebe Waller-Bridge; Stephen King’s The Outsider; the Jordan Peele-produced Lovecraft County) and continue established favorites (Curb Your Enthusiasm, My Brilliant Friend, The New Pope, Westworld). “Everybody overuses the word ‘curated,’ but hopefully it does feel like they’re all very different but you could easily say, ‘That feels like an HBO show,’ because they have those common traits of being well-made, well-written, well-acted,” Bloys said of the network’s upcoming stale. “Thematically, getting at something other than just entertaining. Hopefully, doing both, you know?”

And beyond that, HBO has lined up shows like Joss Whedon’s The Nevers, Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age, Mike Judge’s Qualityland, and of course, the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. If you ask me, the future of HBO looks pretty bright. I’m glad they didn’t let the overwhelming success of Game of Thrones get in their way, and are continuing to make shows that look worth watching.

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