I guess they’ve studied it and decided that the brand is not going anywhere. Now it’s called Max, which sounds like chewing gum or isotonic drink, and HBO will soon stop meaning anything. Having lost its connotation of prestige, its notoriety will also disappear and it will be left in the attic of the nonsense that dad liked. Last year, a contributor to the British edition of HBO Vogue named Riann Phillip wrote a chronicle titled: “I am 23 years old and I just saw for the first time Sex and the City: Here are my impressions.” His impressions were obviously horrendous, and perhaps precipitated the decision of HBO’s current owners to delete the brand. Without intending to, Phillip had written an obituary like the one Borges commented on, who, when asked about the news of his death published in a newspaper, said: “The news is not false, just hasty.”
By sentencing one of its flagship series generationally, Phillip announced the death of HBO a few months before its death was certified. Today we can consider not only the channel dead, but everything it represented, that golden age of series that began as a journalistic claim and ended up being a parodic cliché. We can consider Tony Soprano, McNulty of HBO dead and alive. The Wire and of course, the Lannisters, the Starks and the mother of all dragons. We already said goodbye (without kaddishbut sad) to Larry David, another shaman of the tribe. All that television that wanted to dress up in the finery of cinema and shook off the vulgarity of the idiot box to proclaim ““It’s not TV, it’s HBO” It has gone into storage for good. Mind you, not to the museum of history or antiquities, but to one of those warehouses in industrial estates that rent out rooms with padlocks.
Not only are acronyms dying, nor are series that offend the sensibilities of Generation Z. With HBO, so is ambition, a mischievous elegance, a frivolous and profound way of seeing life, a sarcastic snobbery, an enthusiastic taste for irony and ambiguity, and a radical rejection of the moral as a way of ending a story. HBO, with its pay-TV alibi, broke the prudishness of open channels and treated the viewer as an adult. Just the opposite of what today’s viewer wants. May it rest in peace.
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