Our Flag Means Death and 10 other great original shows Max has brutally canceled

Why is Max canceling so many good original shows?

A lot of these shows were ordered back when HBO's parent company Warner Bros. was still independent, before it merged with Discovery to become Warner Bros. Discovery, or WBD, in April of 2022. David Zaslav, the new CEO of the merged company, made it clear pretty early on that he wanted to save money. “The grand experiment of creating something at any cost is over,” he said later that year. Clearly, cuts were coming.

And cuts came. Starting with Raised by Wolves, Zaslav and his lieutenants hacked and slashed their way through the Max content library, as we've seen. As WBD CFO Gunnar Weidenfels said at a Citibank conference, "[w]e’re coming from an irrational time of overspending with very limited focus on return on investment, and I think others are going to have to make some adjustments that we frankly have behind us now."

Only those times weren't behind them, because Weidenfels said that in January of 2023. The slashing and burning continued the rest of the year through, with three shows getting canceled just this month: Our Flag Means Death, Julia and Rap Sh!t. I don't think you can explain the mass cancelation of shows on Max just by saying that WBD was trying to balance its books.

Things become clearer when you look at what shows Max kept. There remain some original series without any ties to previously established IPs, like the critical darling Hacks. But a lot of the remaining Max shows are part of franchises, like the Batman-adjacent animated comedy Harley Quinn or the Sex and the City sequel show And Just Like That...

Those shows have their merits, but because they're tied to a previously established franchise, they're limited in what new ground they can break. Investing in these shows is less risky than, say, in a show about an android who gives birth to an alien snake monster. They may be a safer bet, but it's harder for them to become the next big thing nobody knew they wanted, which could hurt the WBD brand in the long run.

But that seems to be the direction that WBD wants to go in. Zaslav has said that the company is "focused on franchises." We know that Colin Farrell will star in a show about The Penguin, the villain he played in The Batman movie. There are other DC shows in the pipeline, like the animated Creature Commandos. We've heard a lot about a Harry Potter TV show in the works at Max. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a new Game of Thrones prequel series, may be exclusive to Max. Franchises do indeed seem to be the future.

Max is still making original programming; the Chuck Lorre comedy Bookie just premiered, and shows like Duster and The Girls on the Bus are on the way. But original, trail-blazing shows may soon be the exception rather than the norm on Max, which is sad for a streaming service tied so closely to HBO, which has a reputation for pushing boundaries and taking risks other networks are scared to take.

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