who am i, if i'm not loving hbo?

When you build your entire identity around a network that can't even commit to its own name, the existential crisis comes free with your subscription.

I always needed HBO to make me feel intellectually superior to everyone I knew. Needed it like a parched creature in the desert needs water, like a heroin addict needs their next fix, like the validation I always craved from my dad. I discovered The Wire as a sixteen-year-old in Athens, watching it on a laptop with a battery that ran so hot it left semi-permanent discoloration on my inner thighs.

My bedroom doubled as my personal HBO shrine. I’d prepare my viewing space like the priest preparing communion: back straight against a wooden chair stolen from the kitchen, headphones cranked to exactly 78% volume (loud enough to hear every whispered conversation about the Baltimore drug trade, quiet enough to hear if my mum called), a notebook positioned at exactly 45 degrees to my right hand. I took notes – actual, physical notes – on character development and visual motifs. I stayed perfectly still for fifty-three minutes straight, afraid that any movement might disrupt whatever magic was happening on screen. The pins and needles in my left foot became so severe I had to punch my calf repeatedly to regain sensation. I considered this a worthy sacrifice to the gods of prestige television. I once paused episode seven of season four to write a three-page analysis of how the education system scenes paralleled the failures of the police department. I kept this notebook locked in my desk drawer like pornography. My mum eventually threw it away.

During the golden age (2002-2015), HBO formed the architecture of my personality. I scheduled social events around Monday evening (transatlantic delays, you see) premieres. I ended a promising date because he mentioned he found Six Feet Under "a bit slow." I once called in sick to work to finish Deadwood in a 17-hour binge that left me so dissociated I briefly hallucinated Ian McShane lecturing me about my poor sun exposure levels. When The Leftovers premiered, I created a dedicated email address – itsdeparted333@gmail.com – solely to send episode reaction essays to friends who had stopped responding to my regular emails about the show. I became a missionary for the show, spreading the good word with an intensity that cost me friends. "Emily VanDerWerff called it 'a masterpiece about the unimaginable grief we all carry,'" I'd announce to people who had never heard of Emily VanDerWerff and were just trying to eat their lunch in peace.

My devotion to HBO led me to the unthinkable: In 2018, after pitching HBO UK 3 times, I landed the revered position of managing their social handles. The honor! I told everyone it was just another client, but the truth was much simpler. I wanted to be closer to God. For two years, the job felt like getting paid to practice my religion. I wrote social copy about Big Little Lies with the reverence of a disciple transcribing sacred texts. I created Instagram carousels for Curb Your Enthusiasm with hands trembling from the jitters.

The job felt perfect until I had to promote Game of Thrones Season 8. That’s when the first fracture manifested itself. I scheduled tweets cosplaying as GOT’s #1 fangirl under the @hbouk handle: "OMG THE NIGHT KING?!? #ForTheThrone". I created polls asking "What was your favorite part of tonight's episode?" with four options, none of which were "When I checked my phone because Daenerys became Hitler in seven minutes." I scheduled these posts across time zones, so I had to relive my betrayal in GMT, CET, and EST. In meetings, I presented pie charts showing audience "engagement" had increased 300%, strategically omitting that the engagement consisted of people posting vomiting emojis. I'd smile while reporting these metrics, then go to the bathroom and stare at ceiling tiles until someone from HR knocked on the door to check if I was alive.

Throwback to that one time I caused an international GOT incident because of a tweet I wrote.

I blamed the showrunners for the season’s sloppiness, not HBO. This was a one-off disaster, I told myself.

5 years later, she returned¹, a box in her hands. I felt something shift inside me, something old and desperate, something that had twined itself around my identity. A possibility. A chance. She handed me The Last of Us Season 1, and I opened it like it held salvation, like it might undo the thick weight of disappointment that had settled into my viewing habits. By episode three – the Bill and Frank episode – I was fully reconverted. I watched it three times in one night, crying progressively harder with each viewing until I became so dehydrated I had to drink pickle juice because it was the only thing in my refrigerator. I ended most Slack exchanges at work with "WATCH THE LAST OF US ON HBO" and the HBO logo gif. Most colleagues responded with “Okay 👍”.

Then, in early 2025, Dune: Prophecy arrived.

The show bit into my expectations, sunk its dull teeth into what I thought television could be, dug into my hopes like it wanted to become part of me. It had a color palette so beige that I checked my TV settings constantly. The dialogue felt written by an AI that had been fed nothing but rejected greeting cards. And the accents—sweet Christ the accents—characters from different planets somehow all developed speech patterns specific to Liverpool, England.

The pain was instant, then persistent, then rhythmic. It had a pulse. I could hear it throb in my skull as I watched characters trudge through scenes that seemed designed to test the limits of human attention spans. When the credits of the first episode rolled, I sat perfectly still, staring at the black screen like a prisoner awaiting sentencing. I immediately blamed myself, as one does in toxic relationships. I texted my friend Elena: "Just watched Dune: Prophecy. Incredible worldbuilding. So atmospheric!". I spent forty-five minutes crafting this eight-word lie, deleting and rewriting, adjusting punctuation, considering and reconsidering the use of exclamation points. When she responded "Really? I thought it was boring as hell”, I gasped.

I watched episode two the next week, sitting ramrod straight on my couch, hands folded in my lap like a Catholic schoolgirl awaiting the ruler. I forced my face into expressions of interest – raised eyebrows, occasional knowing smiles, thoughtful head tilts – performing for an audience that consisted only of my reflection in the darkened window. I convinced myself I could make the doubts stop if I just kept watching.

It was a matter of patience. It always is.

But patience didn't change anything. I gave up after episode five.

The pattern repeated with White Lotus Season 3 – a show I'd previously evangelized with such fervor I would fantasize cornering Mike White at a film festival to talk to him about the symbolic significance of the hotel's layout. I prepared for the season premiere by rewatching the first two seasons over a single week.

The premiere began. Forty minutes in, I realized I'd been drifting off for an unknown amount of time, completely dissociated from whatever was happening on screen. I jerked my attention back, rewound seventeen minutes, then watched with such forced concentration that I developed a migraine aura shaped exactly like Walton Goggins' hairline. My left eyelid began to spasm. I finished the episode, immediately opened Threads, and typed: "White Lotus S3 is very promising so far." The post received two likes – both from bots selling cryptocurrency – and a reply from someone called @TV_Dudebro69 asking if I was "smoking crack." I deleted the post.

Of course, I blamed myself immediately. I crafted elaborate theories about Mike White's intentions. Perhaps he was deliberately boring us to comment on the tedium of wealth?

By episode three, I'd developed a system. I'd do jumping jacks² during the opening credits to increase my heart rate and simulate excitement. I'd pinch the inside of my wrist during slow scenes to stay alert. I'd reward myself with a piece of chocolate for every ten minutes I managed to watch without checking my phone. I became a laboratory rat in a self-designed experiment: how much discomfort would I endure for the reward of feeling culturally relevant?

I finished the season choking on my own disappointment.

What followed was The Last of Us Season 2.

By now, my relationship with HBO had become abusive – they hurt me, I made excuses, they hurt me again. My friends had moved on. They texted about The Pitt and Andor while I sat in my apartment, rewatching Veep for the ninth time. "You should really try Disney+," my friend John suggested over a video call. I smiled so widely and for so long that he asked if the suggestion made me uncomfortable. I went home and ordered an "HBO: It's Not TV" vintage t-shirt on eBay, paying €87 including shipping. When it arrived, I slept in it for six consecutive nights, washing it once, by hand, with gentle detergent meant for cashmere.

I approached The Last of Us Season 2 like someone returning to an avoidant partner – hopeful despite all evidence, carrying flowers and apologies. I prepared my viewing space with manic precision: cushions symmetrically arranged on the couch (I watch important television exclusively in the living room now, a ritual my boyfriend tolerates with the resigned patience of someone who fell in love before discovering my HBO obsession), remote wiped clean of any fingerprints, Pepsi Max (I’m THAT kind of gal) and a dinner dignified enough to suggest I'm not emotionally invested in the show, followed by dessert that comforts me when it inevitably disappoints.

The first two episodes teased me with competence, lulling me into thinking maybe, just maybe, the magic remained. Then episode three hit, and everything collapsed like a soufflé in an earthquake. The series transformed from what critics called "a masterclass in adaptation" into a daytime soap opera where characters suddenly needed to explain every emotion directly to camera. Pedro Pascal's subtle, haunted expressions were replaced with monologues so on-the-nose they caused actual nosebleeds. The camera no longer trusted viewers to understand basic human emotions without helpful dialogue like "I am now feeling sad about the apocalypse" and "This reminds me of my trauma from season one, which you may recall occurred during episodes three through five."

Last month, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that Max was becoming HBO Max again. From Max. Which used to be HBO Max. I read the news on my phone during a particularly patronizing monologue about grief, and all I did was laugh. Two years of exec-maxxing.

I obsessively read articles about the name change, searching for some explanation that would make sense of HBO's identity crisis – and by extension, my own. Here I was, pathetically clinging to a network that couldn't even commit to its own name. How many PowerPoints died for this decision? How many marketing executives were now updating LinkedIn profiles while crying into $30 martinis? Did the person who suggested dropping "HBO" from the name still have a job, or were they now living in a box beneath a bridge somewhere in Burbank? And if HBO can’t decide if it still wants to be HBO, how can I justify building my personality around it?

To this day, every time I log into NOW TV (because HBO Max doesn't exist in the UK, forcing me to watch American prestige television through Sky's user interface, which was apparently designed by someone who hates both television and humans), I hear the faint murmur of the masochist in my head—patient, insidious, familiar. A voice that does not reprimand but reminds:

If you cannot remain loyal to HBO through a few disappointing shows, you will abandon everything important at the first sign of trouble. You will become your father, who lied to his mother about where we’d go on holiday instead of telling her we weren’t going to see her.

And I listen.

I have no shame in admitting the distorted relationship I have with something as mundane, as useless, as a streaming service/network I already own alternatives to. I need my stubbornness to manifest somewhere, to have an outlet, to be projected onto minuscule occurrences, onto disappointing TV shows, onto the unnecessary refusal to admit that HBO has lost its magic, onto the silent pact I made with myself to endure. Because if I don't, if I let this relentlessness go unchecked, I will walk through life expecting real suffering to be a test of my endurance. I will mistake unnecessary hardship for fate. Mistake needless pain for proof of my resilience.

And I cannot afford to do that.

I cannot keep placing myself in front of HBO premieres, walking willingly into poor storytelling, just to prove, to the world, to myself, that loyalty is fused into my being. That I am unbreakable. That nothing, no matter how beige, how boring, how convoluted, can wear me down. I thrive on looking at myself in the mirror, seeing the self-restraint in my eyes.

They never talk about this.

They never tell you that the second you come out the other end, once you've survived the HBO golden age you were never meant to see decline, you will have to live with the void it leaves behind. A grueling ghost of a past, not quite yours, but one that chains itself onto you anyway. A fragment of pain carried by someone else, traced into your hands as if it had always belonged to you.

A void where once there was true brilliance, true art, not something imagined, not something imposed by the hubris of studio execs, but something real, something inescapable. And out of fear that you'll lose the threads of the discerning viewer, you test it. You probe at it. You make sure it is still there, still breathing, still alive and well.

Because if you aren't watching HBO, if you aren't enduring it, if you aren’t loving it, then what are you?

Who are you, without the taste that defined you?

I don't fucking know.

How do I admit that even Mountainhead was not very good?

---

A final note for people with taste 🫦

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- Sophie x

1. I guess this is where I make it clear that I’ve loved plenty of HBO shows between GOT Season 8 and LOU Season 1 including True Detective, House of Dragons (mostly Season 1), Penguin, Somebody Somewhere, Chernobyl, Sharp Objects, Mare of Easttown, The Undoing & more.

2. Is this where I confess to this being a slightly satirical piece?