FX Boss John Landgraf Upbeat on HBO Max Removing Series to Sell Elsewhere: “Has Some Value”

One of the biggest stories of the last year had to do with HBO Max’s mass removal of original and library content following the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery. While some of these removed HBO Max originals are expected to go to upcoming ad-supported streaming services, others have less of a clear future and are currently unavailable to watch in any form. At the Television Critics Association’s 2023 winter tour, Chairman of FX Content and FX Productions John Landgraf confirmed that there are currently no plans to do the same for any of FX’s content.

“We don’t have any specific plans to do that, but I wouldn’t rule anything out,” Landgraf said.

But during a time when many have been heavily criticizing Warner Bros. Discovery’s strategy, he didn’t fully condemn the move. Landgraf emphasized that, historically, new distribution systems and technologies have changed how film and television have been distributed and consumed.

“If you go back to the beginning of the theatrical film business, right, the studios made thousands of movies,” Landgraf said. “It took them a while to figure out that actually making fewer, bigger, longer movies and marketing them and distributing them and making things that have a lasting value and then putting those things in their library and licensing those library films to other media — like TV when it came along — had a better economic impact than just flooding the zone with things that were consumed and then discarded. I think that you’re seeing something similar here.”

In the days of traditional television, whether there were three broadcast networks or 200 cable channels, there was a limited amount of “shelf space.” Only a certain amount of shows were able to appear on TV. Landgraf noted those limitations encouraged networks to invest time, energy, and money in quality. But now in the age of streaming and seemingly endless libraries, that boundary has been removed, which has allowed, “ultimately, just an infinite amount of material of mediocre quality.”

Landgraf compared this past model of multiple windows to the single-window strategy many streamers are currently using.

“The entertainment industry has always found ways of making something and then offering it to consumers in different ways in different contexts: with ads; without ads; in premium formats, like theatrical film or say a subscriber service like HBO; in ad-supported formats, in free formats. And it’s figuring it out,” Landgraf added. “If you have a streaming platform that has, you know, 10, 20 thousand pieces of content, it’s very hard to create a user interface that allows people to really find and discover every single piece of content on that streaming platform. So a certain amount of it gets stale. It’s not getting a lot of usage. I think that circulating it somewhere else, someone who would want to market it, who would want to put it forward, has some value.”

This can be interpreted as a fairly optimistic view of the HBO Max situation. Though it has been announced that there are plans for certain shows to be licensed to free, ad-supported streamers, not all of the fates of these removed series have been announced. At the moment, many of these series are not available to watch on any form of streaming, including digital purchase. Many fear that will remain the case.

Landgraf again emphasized that FX has no plans to remove any of its shows at the moment. “I think the industry as a whole is going through this reckoning where it’s realizing that it can’t simplify as much as it has. It has to have a certain amount of complexity and dimensionality,” Landgraf said. “We’re just in this middle inning period of radical transformation from the pre-internet era to the post-internet era. And we’re in the really bumpy part of that transition.”