It's Not TV... It's HBO Max! Again!

In 1972, a new network aimed to deliver TV so good that it was worthy of the cinema. Its name? Home Box Office, a.k.a. HBO. But the name doesn’t mean jack shit unless you back it up with something like The Sopranos or Deadwood—which is exactly what the network did over the next fifty-some years.

That said, when HBO decided to change the name of its streaming service in 2023 from a household brand to something I’ve never heard anyone say out loud, the world immediately let them know that they had fucked up.

Enter: Max. For the most part, everyone still went about calling HBO's streaming service, well, HBO. Sure, you had to type “Max” into your search bar, but no one was walking around and saying they watched a new show on Max. We’re still not “sending X’s” or whatever they’re calling it on Twitter nowadays, and we’re certainly not calling Amazon “Prime Video” without saying “Amazon” first.

That's why today's news hardly surprised me: Max is called HBO Max... again. “With the course we are on and strong momentum we are enjoying, we believe HBO Max far better represents our current consumer proposition,” HBO CEO Casey Bloys reiterated at the network’s upfront presentation in New York on Wednesday. “And it clearly states our implicit promise to deliver content that is recognized as unique and, to steal a line we always said at HBO, worth paying for.”

On a recent episode of The Town podcast, Bloys practically admitted that no one really opened Max to watch Max-specific content. The Discovery shows that Warner Bros. acquired in the merger that convinced them to rebrand in the first place? Try to name even one of those shows. A recent viewership report showed Bloys that audiences wanted to watch The Pitt, The White Lotus, and HBO’s vast library of some of the greatest shows that ever aired on TV. If you ask me? It sounded as if the merger’s failure—confusing subscribers, taking on massive debts from Discovery, and pretending that CNN+ never existed—retaught Warner Bros. the value of his own product again. This isn’t Netflix. Hell, it’s not even TV, remember? It’s HBO.

Let's just hope that HBO Max never dares to drop the "HBO" again. For God’s sake, it’s the one name drifting among a sea of terrible TV that we all knew and respected. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.