HBO’s e-EUtopia
Aniko ImreMedia Industries Journal
HBO has carved out a unique position in the crowded European television marketplace among the many competing terrestrial, cable, and over-the-top streaming services. In a European Union fraught with political and economic divisions, where the dream of a pan-European identity is receding farther and farther into the distance, the values associated with the HBO brand-quality, flexibility, mobility, and cosmopolitanism forged across local affinitieshave conjured up what comes closest to a palatable and desirable European identification. There is a synergy between the European Union's cultural and economic policies, which have been visualized as a database of nimble, adaptable identifications among equally available national, regional, European, and global registers at once, and its media regulation directives, which favor borderless, increasingly Internet-based media services that are able to operate in a trans-European and global scope and offer an expansive catalog of viewing choices to the savvy, cosmopolitan European consumer. HBO is an exemplary match for this cultural, economic, and regulatory landscape. Its catalog of high-quality films and TV programs is available via cable and via streaming platforms, and its specialization in creating quality format adaptations and original television series combines a transnational aesthetic sensibility with themes and genres that resonate across countries but are delivered with local inflections.The HBO brand has given a viable representational form to a pan-European identity that has been criticized as idealized and exclusionary in the past few years. This is a complex phenomenon fraught with irony, where technology, production strategies, delivery platforms, and marketing as well as local histories, themes, narratives, genres, and aesthetics all play a role. I acknowledge this complexity when examining how the HBO brand has aligned itself with the elusive European brand, navigating across the various crises and divides that have afflicted the European Union in recent decades. I am particularly interested in HBO's work in bridging the political division between Eastern and Western Europe through establishing production companies and making original programs in countries
