HBO and Its Legacy

Abstract

This keynote seeks to explore what lessons we can learn from HBO, and how the company functions as a cultural site as it systematically sets about legitimatizing a discourse of television as art. So successful has HBO been in creating a particular restricted field of cultural TV production, set outside the mainstream TV networks—driven as they are by advertising revenue and ratings—and explains how HBO has incorporated artistic norms and principles of evaluation as their main model; and one which has had a profound and lasting impact on ways of thinking and doing television in the marketplace. In short we want to “follow up” on the legacy, of how the HBO brand has legitimized television.