New HBO programming head Casey Bloys will shepherd an impressive stable of scripted dramas, comedies, original movies and specials — the envy of most content distributors across virtually all distribution platforms — but he also has some holes to fill going forward.

Bloys replaces former president of programming Michael Lombardo. Under Lombardo, HBO last year racked up the greatest Emmy Awards performance in history, taking home a network record 43 of them in September, including a record haul of 12 for signature series Game of Thrones.

Bloys, who is also overseeing documentaries, films, sports and Cinemax programming, is in command of an upcoming slate HBO hopes will continue to thrive against emerging powers Netf lix, Amazon and Hulu along with more conventionally distributed rivals such as Showtime, Starz and FX.

With Game of Thrones winding down — it’s signed for another season and likely to have an eighth season, too, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss intimate the end is near — industry observers have wondered what HBO has cooking in terms of potential replacements.

High-profile springtime newcomer Vinyl, from creators Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese and starring Bobby Cannavale and Ray Romano, failed to live up to the hype, although it will return for one more go-round.

Vinyl averaged 4.3 million viewers across multiple plays and screens, according to HBO. Juggernaut Game of Thrones, by contrast, averaged 7.8 million viewers for its May 22 episode.

Sources close to the network say Bloys — who focused mostly on comedy series, late night and specials projects at HBO before adding drama series when executive vice president Michael Ellenberg left earlier in the year — already has his hands on a number of high-profile projects scheduled for this year. They include 1970s porn-themed The Deuce, from producer David Simon (The Wire, Treme); and an adapation of Westworld from Star Trek and Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams.

Comedies Insecure from Issa Rae and Vice Principals, starring Danny McBride, are also in the queue, and drama series The Leftovers will continue with a third and final season.

Lombardo — credited with reviving HBO after a post-Sopranos creative slump with such shows as Boardwalk Empire, True Blood, True Detective and Girls — moves into a production role and will develop projects for the network.

His departure, after more than 30 years at the Time Warner Inc.-owned programmer, hit the trades the afternoon of Friday, May 20. The appointment of Bloys was announced May 23.

HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler praised Lombardo in a statement: “It goes without saying that Mike’s contributions over these many years, most especially in the last nine as president of programming, have been nothing short of extraordinary.”

Along with Ellenberg’s departure, HBO in December named longtime executive Peter Nelson as executive vice president of HBO Sports, replacing Ken Hershman, who had resigned a month prior.

HBO has tapped Peter Nelson to lead the network’s sports department, upping him to executive VP of HBO Sports. He will report to Michael Lombardo, president of HBO Programming.

Nelson joined HBO Sports in 2011 and served as VP of programming for HBO Sports since 2013.

He will oversee the HBO Sports portfolio, which includes HBO pay-per-view boxing, the documentary team and the series Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, The Fight Game With Jim Lampley, Hard Knocks and 24/7.

“Peter Nelson is the ideal choice to spearhead our groundbreaking programming initiatives as well as our commitment to world class boxing, which have made HBO Sports an acclaimed franchise for the network,” Lombardo said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The Television Critics Association tour is known for its unusual and often memorable moments as network executives and talent face the firing line of questions from often-cranky critics. While the cable portion of the TCA was relatively tame with regards to a war of words between critics and on-stage personnel, a few notable exchanges occured over the four-day period.

• Starz CEO Chris Albrecht during his July 31 session took writers to task for perpetuating a perceived war of words between his network and HBO regarding their respective sports-related series, Survivor’s Remorse and Ballers. The day before, HBO president of programming Michael Lombardo had said he wasn’t familiar with Survivor’s Remorse when a writer asked him about a Starz press release that claimed TV critics were more enamored with the basketball-themed series than HBO’s football-focused comedy Ballers, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

After being asked if he had heard of Ballers, Albrecht quickly shot down any beef between the two networks and chided the writer who initially framed the question to HBO. While admitting that “one of our people was out there pitching shows maybe a little bit too ardently” he warned writers to “behave themselves” when asking questions to the stars of Survivor’s Remorse when then came to the stage later that morning, a request that writers honored.

• During network sessions, series producers, directors and stars often look to the press to help promote their projects. But during Discovery Channel’s session on Racing Extinction, a critic asked the documentary’s showrunners what journalists could do to further get out the show’s message that without a serious focus on conservation, the world faces the potential global extinction of numerous species of animals over the next few decades.

Director Louie Psihoyos (The Cove) wasted no time in urging writers to “join the team” by signing up at racingextinction.com for alerts regarding the film, which will air in December.

“Everybody in this room can reach tens of millions of people. That’s huge. That’s a big advantage,” Psihoyos said. “You can magnify [the message] by getting journalists to write about it, getting it on Discovery. It’s all about scaling up.”

• Most cable and broadcast network series showrunners who address the TCA are excited about their projects and openly thank the networks for supporting them. But some critics were taken aback about the almost giddy enthusiasm several producers and showrunners had about working for over-the-top service Netflix, saying that its liberating to have creative freedom and to not to have to worry about ratings or advertiser and network concerns about content.

Reacting to a question about whether it would be hard to go back to working with a network after her Netflix experience, Grace & Frankie showrunner Marta Kauffman said it would be “difficult” working under the more restrictive parameters of traditional television — parameters that the co-creator of NBC’s 1990s mega-hit Friends is familiar with.

“There is this thing about not having to structure a half an hour in six parts … you can’t tell a story in 21 minutes,” Kauffman said. “So I think going back to that kind of difficult, shortened storytelling would be impossible now that I’ve gotten the opportunity to have almost 10 minutes more and let the story tell us how long it should be.”

— R. Thomas Umstead

TCM: Passionate Film-Noir Fans Won’t Cut Class

Zombie shows draw fans in bunches, but film-noir aficionados have more stamina.

That’s one conclusion The Wire drew after hearing the results from a Turner Classic Movies stunt this summer that invited viewers to take an eight-week online course pegged to the channel’s “Summer of Darkness” programming event.

It was the first online course tie-in TCM had tried, general manager Jennifer Dorian explained, and it was a natural one because it fit with an existing Ball State University free course called “Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir.” Enrollees on a weekly basis would watch 45-minute videos and educational lectures, read long articles and take quizzes in order to ace the course, administered by Canvas Network. That’s a fair amount of work to obtain a certificate.

The norm for completing what are called massive online open courses is a rate of around 4% or 5%, Dorian said. The “Summer of Darkness” completion rate stands at 14.4% with results still being tallied.

As for zombies: The biggest- ever MOOC was tied in with The Walking Dead, and drew 65,000 enrollees — but only 3% completed it, according to statistics provided by TCM.

Dorian, over iced teas in New York City last week, said she wasn’t very surprised that a relatively high percentage completed the June and July program. “Our fans go deep; they’re committed to their passion for classic cinema,” she said, adding, “I liked the 20,000 people — that impressed me.” Dorian said the TCM programming formula — uncut, commercial-free movies, primarily from the 1900s to 1979, with some “peppering” of more recent films — still worked and won’t be tinkered with or massively modernized. She does want to do more interactive projects like this online course and create “on-ramps” to draw in younger viewers and more casual movie fans.

The “Summer of Darkness” stunt also struck a social-media chord as TCM sent fans a daily dose of two-minute film noir clips and sought their responses on Twitter (#noirsummer). The clips drew TCM’s highest-ever activity Twitter rate, Dorian said, even surpassing the awards-season staple “31 Days of Oscar.”
— Kent Gibbons

Los Angeles – A strong feeling that going over-the-top would create incremental growth for HBO was a primary reason why the premium programmer pulled the trigger on HBO Now, its new  standalone offering.

“It was done to grow,” Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president of programming, said here Thursday at NewBay Media’s Next TV Summit during an interview with Mark Robichaux, editorial director for Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News.

Lombardo said the stand-alone offering, currently offered by Apple and Cablevision Systems and coming soon to Google’s Android and Android TV platforms, was made to resonate with cord-cutters, cord-nevers and other younger consumers who are steering clear of big bundles as they get out of college and land their first jobs.

For them, “the idea of paying $125 per month for a cable package in addition to starting life [as an adult], is daunting,” he said.

While time will soon tell if HBO’s strategy will succeed, the programmer was willing to take a shot.

“It just felt that it's better to be in front of the pack than the last guy there,” Lombardo said. 

And the pay TV models are shifting as more and more content options become available to consumers.

“You can no longer rely on someone channel surfing to find you,” Lombardo said. “You can no longer rely on Comcast marketing you. You have to have a relationship with the viewer that means something." 

Lombardo also talked about HBO’s decision to offer HBO Now through distribution partners rather than do a direct-to-consumer play.

“We are determined to figure out a way to be ubiquitous in terms of who's distributing us,” he said. “When we made decision to go over-the-top, we made a decision not to handle credit and collections.”

Given the way viewing habits have shifted away from linear, appointment-based viewing to on-demands, Lombardo said he has been surprised that ratings for Game of Thrones have left The Sopranos in the dust (the finale for season five of GoT delivered a record 8.1 million viewers for the network).

“We never saw it [Game of Thrones] as a numbers phenomenon,” Lombardo said. “When we launched Game of Thrones it was a different world,” he added, noting that there’s now a multiplicity of premium networks, basic cable networks and emerging platforms that are all in the business of delivering scripted, branded content.

“Not in our wildest dream” did HBO expect to see ratings for GoT surpass The Sopranos, Lombardo said.

And what about the biggest question GoT fans had following the end of season five: Is Jon Snow really dead?

“I accepted the fact that there were no rules and anybody could go, but somehow [I thought] Jon Snow seemed off-limits,” Lombardo said. “As of today, he’s still dead.”

One thing that won’t happen: “They’re not going to bring him back for ratings…they’re scripting season six as we speak, and I’ll let you know when I read the outlines,” Lombardo quipped.

Lombardo also sees much more GoT to come for HBO as the show forges ahead into storylines that surpass the books. “We’re in season six. I’m hopeful for a seven and eight.”