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I’m Dumping HBO: Here’s Why
We have Direct TV bundled through our local phone company. To keep costs down, I call to see what deals are offered and how I can cut our expenses. Right now, we have a very low rate on movie packages for a year, including HBO. They push HBO all the time. However, I’ve noticed that HBO content has been offering more controversial and explicit material. I’ve flipped through channels of the same old tired movies to “documentaries” and other programming that is actively pushing alternative lifestyles, sex, and drugs. I just read a story that has pushed me to cancel HBO.
Here is the story from Fox News that pushed me over the edge, a show called “Euphoria“:
The show is created by Sam Levinson, son of Hollywood uber-director Barry Levinson, the drama series follows a group of high school students “as they navigate love and friendships in a world of drugs, sex, trauma, and social media,” per the show’s official logline. But the series has come under harsh criticism by some, who find its content far too graphic and explicit for the teen audience it seeks to attract.” In one episode, per the Hollywood Reporter, “close to 30 penises flash onscreen” and in the premiere one character “commits statutory rape with a 17-year-old trans girl” and the show’s lead, Zendaya, 22, overdoses on drugs.
This is supposed to be “entertainment?” Director Barry Levinson gave us movies like Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam, Bugsy, and Wag The Dog. His son Sam, according to Wikipedia, has been an actor, screenwriter, and director since 1992. He comes from a talented family, but he seems to be exploiting the decadent thinking that is prevalent in the entertainment world today.
HBO programming’s new president Casey Bloys previously insisted, “Euphoria’s not for everyone” — it’ll inevitably get people talking” but “it’s not sensational to be sensational”, and supported Levinson’s darker-themed approach to growing up a teen in 2019, because many the scenes are taken directly from his life.
Really?
“HBO did “reportedly push back on two scenes”: a graphic birth scene that featured a close-up of a vagina and a scene in the second episode which depicted dozens of naked boys. Bloys pointed out that HBO’s parent company rarely interferes with the premium network’s creative process.”
How responsible of them.
“No one has come to us and said, ‘Hey, tone this down,'” he admitted. “The only thing they’ve done is given us more money and said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.'” The show, which is loosely based on the Israeli TV show of the same name, also stars Maude Apatow, the daughter of Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann, and is executive-produced by Drake and Future the Prince.“
What? Who are these people?
The exploitation of youth in our current culture is unbelievable. The rapid pace of garbage that is being spoon-fed as the new normal could not be more disturbing. I hope that more people will boycott this kind of programming by canceling subscriptions and changing the appetite for this kind of garbage. If they only recognize a loss of money as a wake-up call, I am more than happy to do my part.
HBO is owned by AT&T, another all-American company that supports many questionable themes and endeavors. I was thinking of changing cell phone carriers to AT&T; now I am rethinking that. Interesting, once you peel back the onion layers, what your money and support are going towards may not be what you think.
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I think a lot of people cancelled their HBO once Game Of Thrones ended.
Now now, it wasn’t quite Caligula or Satyricon.
“For it’s proper for a devoted poet to be moral himself, [but] in no way is it necessary for his poems.”
Maybe Roman Polanski could have learned from Catullus.
I’ve heard that’s why Rome was so good. Roman society was deeply sexist and they owned slaves and they didn’t flinch to to show the harsher parts of society.
A devout Christian or a feminist would have had their prejudices confirmed by the show but they would still have to think about what it was like to live in a different society.
I would try to find a way to see it without supporting HBO. Like, buy it directly from the creators, if they aren’t HBO. Or if worse comes to worse, download it free somewhere.
Exactly. The show did a great job of actually getting in the heads of everyday Romans, whether it was animal sacrifices at the end of prayers or the murder of a slave prompting merely a “that boy was my property!”
Hmmmmm . . . I don’t know . . .
I believe ADT offers something similar (minus the statue, of course) but you have to spring for the platinum package.
If it is any consolation, everything you say is exactly why my household does not bother subscribing to HBO.
Well ol’ Catullus certainly gets your attention.
I highly recommend the movie Eighth Grade to you, from last year.
That looks like an excellent recommendation.Thanks.
From IDMB.com: In his feature film directorial debut, comedian Bo Burnham deftly encapsulates the awkwardness, angst, self-loathing and reinvention that a teenage girl goes through on the cusp of high school. Given that the 27-year-old stand-up comic achieved fame as a teenager himself through YouTube by riffing on his insecurities, he is uniquely capable as the film’s writer and director to tell the story of Kayla, an anxious girl navigating the final days of her eighth grade year, despite creating a protagonist w female instead of male. Like Burnham did more than a decade ago, 13-year-old Kayla turns to YouTube to express herself, where she makes advice blogs in which she pretends to have it all together. In reality, Kayla is sullen and silent around her single father and her peers at school, carrying out most of her interactions with her classmates on Instagram and Twitter. Her YouTube videos are a clever narrative tool that provide insight into her inner hopes and dreams, much like an inspirational online diary. One of Eighth Grade’s biggest triumphs is in its realism.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7014006/plotsummary?ref_=tt_stry_pl
I love that it was not published in English until the late 19th century, because after all, we can’t have anyone who doesn’t already know Latin learn that Romans were human instead of perfect marble demigods.
I don’t know how anyone who studies history comes away with that conclusion.
And I have no idea what old movies make Romans look good.
Of course, Roman Mythology is usually part of children’s education, so it gets a certain cleaning up before presenting, but there’s enough adult content (without getting all-out raunchy) to eventually figure out that that Ephesus temple we think is so great housed a goddess with a multitude of boobs.
In a row?
…
Dante Hicks: 37! My girlfriend ****** 37 *****!
Customer with Diapers: In a row?
(pause)
Dante Hicks: Hey, try not to **** any **** on the way through the parking lot!
(a random customer starts to follow after hearing remark)
Dante Hicks: Hey… get back here!
You must have tuned in late! That’s about a quarter into the ep. The first ep starts out in Rome, setting up Pompey’s story, then goes to Gaul where Caesar is fighting Vertigineux. I think it’s an exceptionally great television show, completely different from I, Claudius, but certainly its equal. Every other TV show set in Rome, by comparison, feels anachronistic, hammy, and less intelligent. Even though Rome has its fleshy elements, it doesn’t succumb to the old trope about Romans constantly having orgies or barfing up peacock eggs.
Massively exaggerates or invents? How?
Again, how? There’s a moment towards the end where a character goes to a room for an interview with the KGB chief; as he enters, he checks behind the door. I didn’t catch it at the time, but later learned it’s a nod to the practice of having someone behind the door to pop the interviewer in the head as he enters. The character sits, looks down, and the camera cuts to a drain on the floor – and that I noticed, and took to understand that it was for hosing down the room. Two wordless references to the rule of fear. He wasn’t shot, as it happened (not a spoiler) and perhaps no one had been shot in his line of work for quite a while. But the fear remained, and persisted, and informed what you did. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
The horrors, such as they are, are bureaucratic and institutional, with a side dish of technical imcompetence and indifference. There aren’t any mass shootings or purges. The series lauds the people who volunteered for their nation, not because a gun was poking in their backs. The gun, as ever, was present – never shown, never mentioned, but always present – but in the end they responded to an appeal to their nation, not the ideology. If there’s a horror of Communism shown in the series, it’s the dull horror of conforming to a litany of dead cliches and empty theories, and how it eats at the soul.
Also the horror of their interior design.
There are a few invented things. The meeting where the old Soviet man orders the phone lines cut didn’t happen, and he was fictional. The Soviets didn’t wait for German schools to close before evacuating Prypiat. Khomuk was a composite character of all the various Soviet scientists who worked with Scherbina and Legasov on the problem. The Minister of Coal was a former miner, not an empty suit. While there was a trial for the three terrible idiots in charge of the plant, Scherbina and Legasov didn’t give testimony at it. There wasn’t an ominous cloud of dark smoke while the building was on fire. While the locals who watched from the bridge all died of radiation, they didn’t get nuclear tans overnight. The Red Forest didn’t die overnight. The men charged with murdering all the former pets were professional animal control people, not new army recruits. Scherbina was short and bald while Stellan Skarsgard is tall and handsome. Legasov killed himself two years and a day after the explosion at his office leaving behind a wife and son, not two years exactly to the minute and leaving behind extra food for his cat.
On the other hand, the explanation and depiction of how the plant exploded was accurate. The massive confusion and butt covering that led to far more deaths than necessary was accurate. How a body collapses due to radiation poisoning was toned down; the real fireman’s wife has said that when she went to lift his arm as he lay dying, his arm bone pulled out of the muscle. The casual disregard for radiation poisoning was accurate — they cut the fact that Kiev’s May Day parade was not cancelled. The thousands of “bio-robots” getting their lifetime exposure of radiation in the 90 seconds they were on the roof was accurate. Hell, they used the actual Peter Jennings clip of when the accident was announced. They used the exact evacuation message for Prypiat. The fireman’s wife did hold her husband’s shoes as he was laid to rest in a sealed lead coffin and buried in concrete because she had no other mementos and his feet had swollen too much to wear them. Her daughter did die four hours after birth because of radiation poisoning.
Sure, it’s a docu-drama and things were changed for narrative flow, but it may well be the most accurate to its subject docu-drama ever made.
I know about a few of those, and once a “composite” character was introduced, I assumed compression for drama’s sake here and there, and discounted all scenes in which she was in as not 100% accurate. Yes, some of the actors looked different; of course they would. But you have to admit:
Nailed that one.
Some people seem to take the show as an attack on nuclear power, but it’s an attack on horribly designed dangerous machines run by butt-covering fools. I’m as pro-nuke as they get, and didn’t feel as if I should rethink my position because the Rookies blew it.
Exactly. Nuclear energy requires honesty — in knowing how the reactor works, in actually being willing to shut down a process that isn’t safe, in admitting just how bad the situation is to keep people safe. You can’t bribe or bully a reactor into doing what the bosses want.
Rome was a great show, and it’s terrible that HBO canceled it early. Same with Deadwood, but the movie was pretty good.
There are ways to watch HBO shows without a subscription if you know what you’re doing.
Much of the criticisms of HBO by the OP have been around for awhile. The gratuitous sex? That’s been around since HBO started, and before they did their own original content. To have woken up to that in the last few weeks, or even months, indicates a lack of awareness.
HBO does lean left. I’m not defending them. So if you want to unsubscribe, have at it.
It’s a little much, however, to extend that to AT&T cell phones.
I listened to the Chernobyl podcasts, and the show runners specifically said that the show was not a screed against nuclear power plants.
There was exaggeration, if not massive exaggeration. When they showed a helicoptor crash as a result of flying directly over the exposed reactor, I later found out that that hadn’t happened.
My favorite scenes involved the coal miners. When the lead scientist asks the Communist official how to deal with them, he says that to tell them the full truth of the risks and what was being asked of them. He says they work in the dark, and that means they see everything.
“HBO will only show this feature at night”
My favorite was seeing that warning before “Sid and Nancy”. At 7:30 in the morning.
Yes, it did … now, it didn’t happen the day Legasov and Scherbina arrived, but later. The radiation weakened the steel which is why you see it crumble like tissue paper.
I believe the rotor clipped a cable. (There’s another video of the accident.) When I saw the scene in Chernobyl, I assumed it hit something; I didn’t think the copter went down because of Massive Radiation Waves. Again, I’m perplexed by the critics who think they’re sensationalizing this. It was very, very, very, very bad, yes, but not very, very, very, very, very bad!
I did appreciate that while the show played up the martyrdom angle for the three divers, the coda notes that two of them are still alive today. The theory is that the water actually shielded their bodies from radiation, as it’s a very good neutron absorber. This is a good explanation of why, explaining what would happen if you went swimming in a spent nuclear fuel pond. With the great tag line:
It was the opening scene of the first disc of the set. I never did “tune in.”
I’m a stickler for getting the right number of very’s. That’s why nobody at our house asks me to help them watch documentaries.
Al – I’m not unaware – I realize that all of the above is the norm in today’s world. However, I draw a big fat red line…when it comes to the exploitation of children and I consider teenagers, under the definition as still defined by society as not yet adults, as children. They are being victimized in all parts of society. An adult can make choices based on maturity even a young adult. I have a major problem with the indoctrination of children by adults, who may have a political, social, monetary, personal or other viewpoint, to push it on kids. They are just learning about the world – and this show, and its support by HBO and AT&T show a lack of concern. Do you agree?