HBO and Its Legacy

© 2016 The Author(s). This an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.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.Non peer reviewedFinal Published versio