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This is the Dunlabel Tarshall with the Stugat's Podcast.

This guy has been very good on the subject of television entertainment content for a long time.

This week after a breathtaking episode, an artful episode of succession that Alan Sepenwald says TV historians will be analyzing and praising for a long, long time.

We got news this week, juxtaposed against succession being an artful show, one of the best ever made in television, maybe the best ever made in television.

You have HBO saying we're going to get dumber, we're going to get worse, we're going to take the name HBO off of Max, we're going to allow discover to ruin content, the best content in the game.

Sepenwald, why are you laughing at me? Because now you've got on HBO Max Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge, the origin story of Gremlins, the spin-off of Bing Bang Theory.

HBO has been exclusive television for a while, and now the owners of HBO say too exclusive?

Yeah, I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing at David Zazlav, the head of discovery who is now somehow in probably the head of HBO.

The people running HBO have been arguing, look, we're still separate, changing the name is actually a good thing because we don't want the HBO brand to be associated with Dr. Pimple Popper or some of these other things.

You'll still be able to get HBO on cable if you're still a cable subscriber at this point, but it just, it doesn't, the optics are not good.

This is one of the great brands in the history of television and they're acting embarrassed by it at this point.

But is this just the lament of media people? Does anybody actually care? I mean, what we're talking about here is HBO's got great content.

Hey, discovery, please don't screw it up. And basically people who are watching HBO are saying and loving HBO, don't corporate this.

Please don't corporate this when obviously they're going to corporate it.

Well, the way I look at it is so this merger happen discovery management somehow wound up in charge, which seems really weird to me.

But so now they're going to do two things. They're going to have this merge service, which will be called max with HBO content, Warner Brothers content, and discovery content.

And then they're still keeping the discovery plus streaming service separate, which to me says basically they recognize that a lot of the current HBO and HBO max subscribers do not care about any of this stuff.

And like that is the less valuable piece of it. And yet they're kind of shoe warning it into the other thing right now.

What do you think is about to happen just in general at HBO and HBO and max to HBO? Are we going to head into a place where their resources aren't nearly what they have been given that I read something about reported 70% employee cuts.

I mean, anytime you have one of these mergers, the cuts wind up brutal and people look at redundancies that the question is like who is being deemed redundant.

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