It’s not teen TV, it’s HBO Max : revaluing and reconstituting teen audiences across different modes of media distribution

This thesis uses the alternative lens of a constructed teen audience to analyze tensions in branding, audience reconstitution, and audience (re)valuation during the formation and launch of HBO Max under WarnerMedia (2018-2022). Most of the existing scholarship on HBO Max narrows in on HBO and its associated audiences/properties to explore the ramifications of WarnerMedia’s shift to a streaming-first business model. By centering teen audiences, one of the so-called bad objects against which HBO was positioned, this thesis investigates how this economically and culturally desirable, yet elusive, audience was explicitly and implicitly courted despite efforts to maintain pre-existing quality branding. By using an industrial discourse analysis approach, I interrogate how the shift to a streaming-first business model necessitated that WarnerMedia’s teen brands and properties be repositioned for the launch of their new streaming service, and that their teen audience be reconstructed as users in contrast with subscribers. To this effect, I first survey the industrial landscape surrounding the launch of HBO Max, but specifically prioritize how WarnerMedia’s co-owned broadcast venture, The CW, was affected by the launch. Then, I employ two case studies to explore these issues further. First, I look at HBO Max’s attempt to revitalize Gossip Girl (The CW 2007-2012) through their 2021 reboot of the series, which underscores the tensions between The CW brand being conceptualized as low-brow and Gossip Girl as a franchise serving as a valuable transitional text for HBO Max. Second, I focus on HBO’s Euphoria (2019-present) shifting from pay cable linear distribution in its first season in 2019 to concurrent linear and nonlinear distribution during its second season on HBO Max in 2022. This shift in distribution, I argue, allowed the series to function beyond the user and subscriber distinction through a conflation of linear and nonlinear audiences. Ultimately, these case studies of how one service attempted to accommodate and reconfigure a wide breadth of teen-oriented content, in an effort to revalue the content’s associated constructed audiences, highlight broader implications of the challenges faced by legacy media companies as they repositioned themselves for streaming.Radio-Television-Fil