Post by Ripley on Apr 13, 2016 16:08:35 GMT -5
Terrence Winter ousted as Vinyl showrunner. HBO has a problem with its drama series.
"...Fact is, HBO hasn’t come up with an undeniable drama hit since GoT bowed in 2011. And while the network has faced creative dry spells in the past, it’s never done so while operating in a competitive landscape where so many rivals (Netflix, Amazon, AMC, FX, Showtime) were churning out prestige programming on a par with the pay-cable pioneer. This new reality helps explains why HBO made such a major bet on Vinyl: The nearly two-hour pilot, directed by Scorsese, carried a price tag upwards of $30 million, industry sources have told Vulture and other media outlets. No network—not even HBO—spends that sort of sum unless it believes it has a potential signature series on its hands. HBO clearly believed it had a possible game-changer with Winter’s show, making it all the more painful when audiences never really showed up and when even critics who liked the show were relatively restrained in their praise. This disappointment suggests a reason why execs felt it necessary to “make a change in the creative direction of the show,” as the network put it in a statement Friday.
Winter—whose relationship with the network extends all the way back to his days as a showrunner on The Sopranos—is the kind of trusted producer to whom the network historically would’ve given a wide berth. And on the comedy front, HBO can still afford to be forgiving: It’s had better luck generating buzz with half-hours (Girls, Veep, and Silicon Valley have all been zeitgeist shows) and production costs are much smaller. HBO didn’t replace the creators of Togetherness, Looking, Doll & Em, or Enlightened in between their respective first and second seasons, even though the viewership for all four series was tiny. But after a string of big-budget drama disappointments, HBO arguably doesn’t have the luxury of a laissez-faire series oversight anymore. It needs the second season of Vinyl to be markedly better than season one, and it needs to convince viewers who opted out of the show early on—or those who never bothered to tune in—that there’s a reason to watch.
HBO declined to make executives available to comment for this story, and a PR rep for Winter did not respond to an interview request, so it’s not yet clear whether the network rejected the writer’s plans for Season 2 or if some other conflict led to his departure. It doesn’t seem a stretch, however, to assume HBO brass felt the need to protect their investment in Vinyl outweighed whatever bad PR or hurt feelings might result from the change. Replacing Winter doesn’t guarantee Vinyl will magically fix itself creatively or that viewership and buzz will suddenly soar when the show returns. But it does offer HBO the chance to reset the narrative surrounding the series, increasingly the odds Vinyl becomes a fixture on the network instead of ending up the TV equivalent of a one-hit wonder..."
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