HBO Axes CEO After Arrest

New management picks a new crop of shows, hoping for a winner

(NEWSER) - HBO, at 36 years old no longer a bold young upstart of a network, is struggling to come up with hits to match The Sopranos and Sex & The City, the Wall Street Journal reports. Changes in the top ranks have meant shifts in direction: The Texas-set Lily Tomlin drama 12 Miles of Bad Road HBO was ditched after execs saw the first few episodes. More»

Albrecht takes indefinite leave after drunken arrest Sunday

(NEWSER) - HBO's capo is making like Tony Soprano and taking an indefinite leave of absence from the cable network. Chris Albrecht, who has led the network since 2002, was arrested by Las Vegas police on Sunday, after officers said they witnessed Albrecht in a violent altercation with his girlfriend. More»

We don't care about platforms, Michael Wolff argues, we care about shows

(NEWSER) - Sunday should have been a banner night for HBO, with Game of Thrones and the premiere of its latest "zeitgeist-courting" show Girls. But Michael Wolff didn't tune in—though not for lack of trying. Wolff and his companion "don't have HBO. And, it turns out, after some hurried calling around, nobody we know has HBO. They all did; now, they don't," he writes in the Guardian . Pretty much everyone he called deemed HBO either too expensive, too "uncool," or both. "If I were HBO, I'd find this alarming." More»

(NEWSER) - Some things are certain: death, taxes, and Cinemax showing women with their shoes on having sex late at night. Soft-core porn is "in our DNA," an exec with the parent company of "Skinemax" tells the LA Times . "We're not running away from it." Neither are its premium-cable competitors, which are hardly relegating racier content to late night. Consider HBO's True Blood and Showtime's explicit Californication. More»

Claire Danes shines in title role as animal behavior expert

(NEWSER) - Temple Grandin, the renowned animal behaviorist who credits her achievements to her autism, values "tangible results" over emotion—and so does her HBO biopic. The eponymous film, debuting tomorrow, "avoids the mawkish clichés" so typical of made-for-TV movies, instead delivering "a movie that is funny, instructive, and also intangibly charming," writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times . More»