Is HBO the best channel ever?

[The Curmudgeon]

Tell you what, you Americans don't know how lucky you are.

I started watching Six Feet Under (typical Curmudgeon; get into a show about six years after it ends) and it's superb. The writing, direction and acting is just light years ahead of anything the UK churns out (if the UK even MAKES quality drama anymore. "What's that? People can't phone in and vote people off? Who the fuck wants to watch that?") and a familiar logo appears before the show starts.

A logo that I've seen on a few other top quality shows; HBO. Now, we don't get HBO over in the UK, but we do get a hand picked selection of the programs available on it. And holy shit is it a "read it and weep" kind of list. On HBO, now and in the past, have been the likes of..

Curb Your Enthusiasm
Flight of the Conchordes
Extras
Entourage
Da Ali G Show
Deadwood
The Wire
Band of Brothers
Oz
Dream On
The Larry Sanders Show
Tales From the Crypt
Sopranos
The Chris Rock Show
Spawn
and, erm,
Sex and the City

Now, that's only a selection of the shows I've actually heard of, there are dozens of others that haven't touched down on these shores that could be brilliant too.

So what's the deal with HBO? Do you pay for it monthly? How much is it? And is it, as the evidence here clearly suggests, quite simply the Best Television Channel - Ever?

[Benjamin Haines]

It's a monthly payment type thing. HBO and other premium cable channels mostly play movies but some of them do offer their own original programming. Most cable/satellite service plans offer premium channel "packages" as optional extras. HBO, HBO2, HBO Comedy, HBO Signature, and whatever the hell else they've got would make up a single package. The interesting thing is that HBO (along with several other big-name cable networks) have two of every channel. There's HBO, and then there's also HBO-W, which is the version that broadcasts as the "regular" HBO on the west side of America. Because America is divided into four time zones (from west to east: Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern), a program that airs at 8:00pm in the Eastern time zone would be airing at 5:00pm on the other side of the country, and they can't have that. HBO-W plays the same exact programming schedule as HBO but exactly three hours behind it. I've never been that far west in my life, but I assume that they just call it HBO over there, and perhaps they've got an "HBO-E" channel that plays the programming three hours ahead of schedule?

Other premium channels include Cinemax, Showtime, Encore, Starz and The Movie Channel, each with their own additional channels to go with the package (Encore Action, etc). Of those, I believe Showtime are the only ones who actually make their own original programming besides HBO. Showtime are responsible for such shows as Dead Like Me, Penn & Teller: Bullshit, and, one of my personal favorites which I recently discovered, Weeds.

While the Federal Communications Commision (FCC) is able to mandate censorship on the nationally broadcast networks in America (ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS, the CW, UPN), any channel that is only available through voluntary payment services is free of such restrictions. Most of the channels on basic cable (Discovery, Disney Channel, MTV, Comedy Central, etc.) censor themselves out of fear that advertisers and cable service providers won't affiliate with them otherwise, and that's a cycle that's been kept up for decades now. But because premium cable channels like HBO are purchase-specific, they don't rely on advertising. As such, the programming on those channels airs without commercial interruption and almost entirely without self-censorship. Language and violence are left untouched in what airs on those channels, and at night they're usually dominated by softcore porn. The only thing the owners of those premium channels will not air is hardcore porn. HBO has shows which document Las Vegas brothels and the porn industry in Hollywood, but none of the footage they put on there will ever show penetration onscreen. Aside from that, those channels are censorship- and advertisement-free, which is the creative talent behind their programming don't hold anything back when it comes to making shows like The Sopranos.

[trashcanman]

HBO is not the best channel ever. They've had tons of great shows (I'm dying to see "True Blood"), but you pay big bucks monthly and typically only a couple of shows at a time are running weekly and it's often re-runs since you have lengthy waits in-between seasons. 90% of the programming is shitty Hollywood movies and the same dozen or so are played on almost every version of HBO at different times daily for months on end. Even the "porn" shows like "Real Sex" are the same handful of episodes they've been playing on a loop for at least a decade. This would be fine on basic cable, but if they're asking more a month for that shit than for Netflix, they can kiss my ass. I'll wait for the DVD's. Good on them for creating advertisement-and-censorship-free zone, but I'm not made of money.