HBO

Actors, writers and directors remember the highs and lows of making the seminal ’90s series, which aired for the last time 25 years ago this week.

Succession went out at the top of its game. The HBO series wrapped its final season on Sunday, revealing once and for all who would prevail as the new CEO of Waystar Royco. The finale drew 2.9 million viewers across Max and linear telecasts Sunday night, marking a new series high. Prior to the finale, the Sunday night high for Succession was Episode 6, which aired on April 30, with 2.75 million viewers. The Season 4 finale was up 68% versus the Season 3 closer.

Larry David is pretty ready to say goodbye to TV’s Larry David. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is likely to end with the already announced 12th season, sources say. The forthcoming season, which does not yet have a premiere date, wrapped filming this week and the final episode felt like a homecoming, according to a source.

Succession, the Emmy-winning HBO drama that helped redefine the premium cable network following the end of Game of Thrones, is ending. Creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong revealed that the upcoming fourth season will indeed be its final run on the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed premium cable network.

The yanking of Westworld and Love Life from the streamer is designed to appease Wall Street, not consumers, one expert says.

Warner Bros.Discovery said that some of the shows that it has been moving off of HBO and HBO Max in order to save money will be licensed to third-party free, ad-supported streaming TV services. The company has ditched the “everything streaming” strategy that WarnerMedia executives have been following before WarnerMedia was acquired by Discovery. Instead, the company will make decisions about how to monetize shows on a case-by-case basis.

Tarantino first joined HBO in 1990 as an executive secretary. She rose through the ranks as a publicist before being promoted to vice president in 2004. She was named senior vice president in 2017. It was during that time that HBO became a dominant force in scripted originals, with many of the shows that Tarantino worked on going on to not only drive viewership but also substantial awards recognition.

HBO/HBO Max EVP and head of communications Karen Jones is exiting the company after 23 years, she announced in a memo to staffers Thursday. Jones has been in this role since 2019, helping navigate HBO’s communications through ownership changes, the launch of HBO Max (which became part of her purview in 2020) and the COVID-19 pandemic.

As veteran media reporters Felix Gillette and John Koblin explain in their new book, It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO, HBO was born from journalism, a byproduct of Time Inc.’s plan to diversify its holdings. Their gossipy, cameo-padded reporting breezes through the improbable story of how a print media company invested in a scheme to bring a clearer television picture to certain neighborhoods, embraced satellites and discovered that original programming was a cheaper way to fill its slate than paying Hollywood studios.

An early top executive at the network believed that “the man of the house” paid for cable TV subscriptions. That mind-set affected HBO’s programming for decades.

Larry David’s comedy is the longest-running scripted series ever on the premium cabler.

The premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon pulled in a record-setting audience on Sunday. The Game of Thrones prequel, which is set about 200 years before the previous series and focuses on the Targaryen family, drew nearly 10 million viewers across all platforms in the United States, HBO says. That’s the biggest series premiere in HBO’s history.

For decades, HBO has been an anchor of the cable portion of Television Critics Association’s press tour with the network’s signature three-hour block of wall-to-wall panels packed with big stars. This summer, for the first time in as long as anyone can remember, there will be no HBO presence at TCA in Pasadena. In fact, the entire newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery is skipping the upcoming press tour as the company is going through the integration process, including layoffs, with the next wave rumored to come during TCA.

Martin and Clarke give some behind-the-scenes details about the Game of Thrones sequel in the works, and Gwendoline Christie weighs in as well.

As HBO is preparing to launch of a Game of Thrones prequel series, the network also is exploring a potential sequel centered around one of the original series’ most recognizable characters, Kit Harington’s Jon Snow. The project is still in exploratory stages, sources said.

The Oscar-winning actress and director, following a prolonged round of negotiations, has been tapped to star in the fourth season of HBO’s True Detective. She will also be credited as an executive producer of the anthology.

AT&T, in its Wall Street swan song as an entertainment entity, reported solid subscriber pickup for HBO Max and HBO for the first quarter of 2022 on Thursday. The now-divested WarnerMedia unit was again a drag on profitability because of continued investments in HBO Max and the launch of CNN+ — reflecting a key reason AT&T spun it off.