Remember what the slogan says? “It’s not television. It’s HBO.” But if you think about it, it’s the same television, only with more nudity and controversial decisions behind the scenes. That said, nobody can deny that Home Box Office has been consistently putting out amazing, thought-provoking movies and T.V. shows for decades at a relatively low cost of a few extra bucks. HBO gave us such gems like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Girls, Westwood, and countless more highly bingeable projects.
But it’s not all puppies and rainbows. HBO has had its fair share of scandals, especially since the Internet became a thing. Let’s look at some of them and outrage together!
1. Series about slavery from the GoT creators
While working on the final seasons of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss pitched a rather strange idea to their HBO overlords. Imagine a series titled “Confederate” set in the alt-history U.S. where slavery was never banished. It sounds kinda messed up, doesn’t it? The higher-ups did not like the idea either, so the project was put on ice in 2017 and probably wrapped in a “do not open” tape.
2. T.J. Miller leaves Silicon Valley
Having seen only two seasons, I fully understand why the showrunners would want to get rid of T.J. Miller’s character, and apparently, they did that in season 4, throwing him into an opium den somewhere in Asia. When asked about such a controversial decision, the execs noted that T.J. was always late for table reads, and that’s if he even showed up. So first, they wanted to cut the number of episodes featuring the comedian from 10 to 3 but ended up basically killing him off.
3. Drama surrounding Girls
The 2012 comedy series Girls is pretty much Sex and the City but worse. However, it managed to gather millions of fans with its relatable situations surrounding four millennials living in New York, doing what they can to get their lives in order. And while the fans are allowed to love whatever they want, it didn’t change the fact that the show was a horrible example of how the youth should live their lives and solve banal issues. Also, as years went by, viewers realized that the show didn’t include any people of color and tried to gaslight us into thinking that the encounter between Adam Driver and Shiri Appleby’s characters was not sexual assault.
4. Westworld elephants scandal
Westworld is one of the most exciting series HBO has ever made, and even this project has its fair share of controversies. The biggest one (literally) being the PETA scandal about potential elephant abuse on the set. As usual, PETA claimed that the two lovely beasts were being tortured behind the scenes, even though there was no evidence of abuse. To be on the safe side, HBO execs issued a statement assuring the public that both elephants on the set were “treated with the utmost care and respect for their health, safety, and well-being.
5. HBO Max digital release controversy
This scandal is still pretty fresh in our memories, as it blew up in 2020 when WarnerMedia announced a whole lineup of their highly anticipated movies to be released on their streaming service — HBO Max, due to the spread of COVID-19. For us viewers, this was amazing news, but it turns out the stars had no idea about Warners’ new plan. We got to watch Godzilla vs. Kong, Wonder Woman 1984, and many other movies from the comforts of our homes while major Hollywood directors and actors were trying to navigate this kerfuffle.
6. When Talking Funny suddenly wasn’t that funny
Talking Funny was a one-hour HBO special featuring popular stand-up comedians discussing what makes their jokes funny. They were: Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais, and Louis C.K. One time, Chris Rock called Louis C.K. the blackest white man, to which C.K. responded with that one N-word that gets people canceled all the time. Everyone laughed and moved on, but seven years later, the clip hit the Internet, and the rest is history.
7. Big Love and even bigger outrage
At first glance, Big Love is just another soapy drama, but if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see the main hook: it’s about a guy, his three wives, and their kids living in a fundamentalist Mormon community. You can already hear the screeches of everyone who got offended by this show merely existing. The rituals were all wrong, and the ideas shown by the screenwriters were outrageously offensive. So much so that the churchgoers signed a petition to have HBO take Big Love off the air. And while they did apologize, the show went on to air as scheduled and even had a rerun.
