HBO Is Losing Its Most Powerful Weapon. What Happened? (2024)

House of the Dragon is the most expensive show on HBO, and its Season 2 finale drew nearly 9 million viewers on Sunday night, but the season hadn’t even ended before the network was promising viewers that “the best is yet to come.” A sizzle reel released shortly before the finale teased the upcoming return of favorite shows like The White Lotus, The Gilded Age, and The Last of Us, which has become HBO’s biggest hit since Game of Thrones. But while fans of those shows have plenty to look forward to in 2025, there’s not much on offer for the rest of this year. In the next couple of weeks, there’s the third season of Industry, a buzzy drama with a dedicated but tiny viewership, and Chimp Crazy, a docuseries from one of the creators of Tiger King. Fall brings The Penguin, starring an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as The Batman’s underworld boss; Dune: Prophecy, a long-gestating spinoff about the hit movies’ secretive sisterhood; and, speaking of franchises, The Franchise, a series from the creator of Veep about the making of an ill-fated superhero movie.

HBO’s Sunday nights were the last time slot, the one place outside of live events, where we could all tacitly agree to respect the sameschedule.

Although those upcoming offerings tilt toward the uninspired corporate synergy that’s been a priority since HBO’s subsumption into the newly created Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022—both The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy are descendants of Warner Bros.–owned IP, as is next year’s prequel series It: Welcome to Derry—there’s enough talent attached to each to assume they’ll at least be worth a look. But that assumption hasn’t always been borne out on HBO this year, even in the historically bulletproof Sunday night slot. The Regime, starring Mare of Easttown’s (and before that, Mildred Pierce’s) Kate Winslet and created by Succession’s Will Tracy, debuted in March to middling reviews and worse numbers, with an audience of just over 300,00 dwindling to a third of that by the limited series’ final episode. The Sympathizer, which followed it in April, fared even worse. Only a month after winning an Oscar for a movie that grossed nearly $1 billion, Robert Downey Jr. drew barely 100,000 viewers to a show directed by the art-house favorite Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and co-produced by A24. The Jinx: Part Two, which aired alongside it, was a nine-years-later follow-up to the whodunit docuseries about Robert Durst. The first Jinx became a national phenomenon. The sequel was barely a blip.

What’s especially concerning about these series isn’t that nobody watched them. Even HBO has had its share of flops. It’s that no one was even talking about them. The Sunday night slot, where HBO began to cluster its original programming in the late 1990s, has been so firmly associated with the network’s premium fare that by 2002, they could claim that “Sunday is … HBO”—and with The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Six Feet Under to back up the claim, it was hard to argue. By the time House of the Dragon launched 20 years later, only a fraction of the audience was actually watching the show on Sundays, but given the amount of media coverage timed to the precise moment each episode finished airing on linear TV, it was impossible to miss what night the show belonged to, no matter when you chose to view it. Even when that time slot meant that the final episode of The Last of Us’ first season would air opposite the 2023 Academy Awards, HBO stuck to its guns—and drew the show’s biggest audience ever. “Sundays are obviously a defining element of our brand,” an HBO executive told Marketing Brew last year. “It’s part of our DNA.”

There were other nights, of course, but launching a show on Sunday was HBO’s way of signaling that it was a big deal—or, as when The Gilded Age shifted from Mondays to Sundays with its second season, that it had become one. Viewers of a certain demographic responded in almost Pavlovian fashion, as did the media outlets that cater to them, accepting each new episode as that week’s designated discussion topic. A little more than a decade ago, that slot was powerful enough to thrust a debut series by an obscure indie-film director named Lena Dunham into the national spotlight; now, not even the star of Titanic can draw a crowd. If you’re looking for new faces and fresh ideas, you’re better off staying up late on Friday nights, where HBO has programmed a succession of innovative half-hours that include Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, How to With John Wilson, Julio Torres’ Fantasmas, and Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. Those shows might not draw huge numbers—and naturally, a good chunk of their audience prefers to catch up with them on streaming—but they’re irresistible think-piece fodder. (Even people who didn’t watch Carmichael’s show got drawn into the debate over his tongue-in-cheek comments about sexual race play.) A show like The Regime may present as edgy satire, but there’s comparatively little food for thought in its portrait of an Eastern European dictatorship. Resolved: Totalitarian repression is bad.

Even among HBO’s most famous Sunday night conversation pieces, the talk hasn’t always translated into huge audiences: Succession drew under 3 million viewers for its series finale, less than a third of House of the Dragon’s. But from the way they were covered and discussed, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were massive hits, the kind of show where not being caught up means missing out on the cultural discussion. More than raw numbers, it’s that intangible quality that drives subscriptions, a crucial element in a saturated marketplace where viewers are dropping streaming services at ever-increasing rates.

It takes a steady stream of must-see content to stave off “churn,” the dreaded phenomenon of users canceling subscriptions once they’ve seen everything they feel they need to see, a much simpler and more fluid process now that you don’t have to call your cable company and turn down half a dozen discount offers before they’ll let you cancel. “Churn is just the killer in this business,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav told industry analysts in May, part of the reason Max made a deal to offer the service as part of a bundled subscription with Hulu and Disney+. (You might run out of stuff to watch on one service, but all three?) In a second-quarter earnings report released yesterday, WBD announced it was reducing the valuation of its linear TV holdings by over $9 billion, sending stock prices plummeting to a record low.

Even so, the decreased visibility of HBO’s Sunday shows has been sobering to witness in real time. Whether you liked The Regime or not (I didn’t), it had the kind of pedigree that would once have guaranteed a significant audience, at least for its first episode. But perhaps because of the Zaslav-era mandate to drive viewers toward streaming and away from cable, the designation no longer seems to carry the weight it once did. Viewers have been trending that way for a long time, of course, but even if they were watching on their laptops, they stayed faithful to the broadcast schedule. House of the Dragon was on at 9 p.m., regardless of what “on” meant.

In an age of viewing on demand, where networks are more likely to provide you with an entire season of, say, The Bear and let you consume it at your own pace, HBO’s Sunday nights were the last time slot, the one place outside of live events, where we could all tacitly agree to respect the same schedule, both for watching the show and publicly reacting to it. That unifying experience was long what distinguished TV from other mediums. You couldn’t arrange for millions of people to see the same movie at the 7 o’clock show on a Friday, but you were free to talk about the M*A*S*H finale the next day without worrying that you’d be spoiling it for some spoiler-averse fan who hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That impulse carried over to online newsgroups and internet forums, and helped establish the cadence of online culture coverage as we still know it. Without a set date and time by which at least the most dedicated fans—the ones who want not just to watch a show but share it—can abide, the response is more diffuse, and without the weekly drip of fresh content, it dries up much more quickly. (If The Bear’s third season had been released one at a time, we’d all be talking this week about how great Tina’s episode was.) Some streamers, like Apple TV and Hulu, have stuck with a weekly release pattern, but they dilute the effect by dropping new episodes at midnight. I doubt any but the most avid of Ted Lasso­–heads could tell you what day it aired.

On the day after the finale, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal announced that the series would end with its fourth season, which, if it follows the pattern of the rest, would air in 2028—a grand total of 34 episodes produced over the same time span as eight seasons of Game of Thrones. It joins a miniature trend of big-ticket shows going multiple years between seasons, including Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Apple TV+’s Severance, and Netflix’s Stranger Things. Some of these long waits are due to COVID delays and the dual strikes that shut down the industry last year. But it’s also a function of their massively escalating budgets: Severance’s next season reportedly cost more than $20 million an episode, and House of the Dragon wasn’t far behind that. That’s more like the wait between Harry Potter books or Mission: Impossible movies than it is the steady rhythm of a TV series, and it obliterates the habitual viewing that made time slots like NBC’s fabled Thursdays such valuable real estate.

HBO’s Sunday nights were the last outpost of appointment viewing, the one remaining place you could signal a show’s importance just by virtue of when it was on the air. The Penguin has a shot at being one of fall’s big hits, a spinoff of a $770-million-dollar movie anchored by a major star, but it’s rolling out new episodes on Thursday nights, perhaps because that’s a more familiar time for younger audiences reared on Netflix’s end-of-week drops, and perhaps because they’re actively avoiding the association with quality that Sunday connotes. (You don’t want Batman fans thinking it looks more like The Wire.) No doubt that when The White Lotus and The Last of Us return next year, they’ll be back in their familiar Sunday-night berth. But like one of Westeros’ deposed rulers, it won’t wield the same power it used to.