BierdopjeV3 Alpha nu beschikbaar. Wil je helpen? Kijk dan hier

Is 'Boardwalk Empire' HBO's next 'Sopranos'?

Geplaatst op 22 september 2010 07:00 door gsprimo

Pay TV net spends big on drama, renews after strong debut

A line that resonates late in the opening episode of "Boardwalk Empire" comes when the central figure's protege brings his mentor up short with a stern bit of advice: "You can't be half a gangster, Nucky, not anymore."

The advice isn't welcome. The protege, Michael Pitt's emotionally wounded war veteran Jimmy Darmody, has been overstepping his bounds with the boss, Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson -- but it's clearly correct.

In similar fashion, when HBO set out to make the series -- which was renewed Tuesday, two days after attracting 4.8 million viewers (7.1 million including repeats) to become its most-watched premiere of any program in six years -- it realized you can't make half a gangster epic.

That's how HBO came to hire Martin Scorsese to executive produce and direct the 70-minute pilot and budget nearly $20 million for it. (Read THR's review here.)

Before that figure (about double the going rate for a TV pilot) was made public, there was a lot of guesswork as to what a month of shooting (about triple the typical schedule for a pilot) had cost HBO. The New York Post's Page Six threw a haymaker guess of $50 million, leading HBO to point querying media toward the Wall Street Journal's later, gentler $18 million estimate.

The subsequent 11 episodes now in the can -- they push the story, largely set in a carefully re-created boomtime Atlantic City, across nine months of 1920 beginning with the opening night of Prohibition -- averaged about $5 million to shoot. With the first ratings in, HBO was quick to order a new season, leaving the number of new shows unspecified (but very likely 12, matching the current cycle).

"It's more than a little victory," Standard & Poor's equity analyst Tuna Amobi said. "This makes it a potential juggernaut that's blown away even the more optimistic expectations."

The series debut's debate-snuffing number aligns with a generally -- but hardly unanimous -- upbeat set of reviews to let the network breathe much easier. Given the amount of earlier buzz, both in the industry and with the eager populace, HBO wasn't likely to get a standing ovation without hitting a home run.

Even the highly successful "True Blood," with its steadily ascending viewership across four seasons and sturdy DVD sales, has somehow been regarded as kid stuff alongside the epochal, 330-pound goombah that was "The Sopranos." (By the end of its run, the mob drama had an average viewership of nearly 9 million; the vampires series hovers at around half that.)

At a time when HBO's subscriber base is taking a small but unwelcome downtick, even the passing hullabaloo that was set off by early reports of "Empire's" high production costs can sting. HBO executives can and frequently will point out that their steady revenue stream has been fattening Time Warner's bottom line for years. And co-president Eric Kessler's oft-repeated mantra that exclusive, high-quality content will generally be rewarded by subscribers willing to pay a premium for the service (with handy cost escalators built into the network's deals with cable providers) has mostly kept Wall Street pretty upbeat.

Said industry analyst Richard Greenfield of BTIG: "HBO is in the midst of a creative resurgence. Every year they must continue to do what I would call 'feed the beast' and give people a reason to keep paying a substantial amount of money every month. And one way you do that is through irreverent original programming."

But Benchmark Capital recently downgraded both Time Warner and Viacom from "buy" to "hold" based mostly on the blah industry- and economywide forecasts. In February, Sanford C. Bernstein cable and satellite analyst Craig Moffett called the Time Warner Cable side "the single most attractive name in our coverage universe -- and by a wide margin," but by August he was warning that though "cord cutting," or dumping cable, is "overhyped," consumers ' impatience with rising prices soon could synergize with alternative delivery systems "storming the castle" to undercut cable subs.

Still, HBO's brain trust seems determined to hew to the business model that brought them this far.

"To count on a hit is a recipe for disaster," HBO programming president Michael Lombardo said. "I just think all we need to do is lean into the quality, believe in what you're doing, and hope that you find an audience there."

"Empire" showrunner and series creator Terence Winter ran with the show's premise at HBO's behest after executive producer Mark Wahlberg, tuned in with Scorsese since they made 2006's "The Departed," recruited the filmmaker.

Winter is best known for playing accomplished second fiddle to "Sopranos" creator David Chase -- and for that mysterious fade-to-black ending; was Tony really whacked to the strains of Journey in that diner? -- and he and Scor¬sese spent more than a year with two teams of writers developing "Empire" from Nelson Johnson's nonfiction book, "Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City." He was more than content to step back when Scor¬sese agreed to make the pilot and stay aboard.