He’s very confident about his record and he can be incredibly entertaining. I think Michael Fuchs prides himself on being fearless in terms of not trying to hold his finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. Of the hundreds of people you interviewed, who gave you the best material? So, again, the word I come back to is “sadness” that it was not able to continue. For HBO, it was a double-down on sadness - not only is it losing a show that was such an outlier in terms of what it was trying to say, but then to have a Black showrunner - and a female Black showrunner - is not something that happens every day, and people were incredibly excited about that. I had several sources within HBO and elsewhere - people who worked on the show and people who represented people on the show - who said the environment on the show was not a healthy one. It turns out neither was the real reason. The second was there wasn’t a compelling vision for the next season. When the show got canceled, there were two predominant explanations out there. Lovecraft was a beautiful show in terms of its look, its narrative and what I would also consider to be an exceptional marriage of storytelling and music.
Are there more details on what happened? Did Green respond to that accusation at all?
One of the surprises in your book was the claim that Lovecraft Country was canceled after HBO spent $150 million on its debut season because showrunner Misha Green allegedly created a “toxic” and “hostile” work environment, according to other writers on the show. Hats off to Jonah and Lisa for hanging in there during some incredibly uncertain and ambiguous times. There was a lapse in what the executives wanted and the creatives were thinking. The show was so big and its ambition so vast, there wasn’t a united, effective understanding on the part of HBO about what it wanted or how best to protect the creators and the showrunners. It’s interesting that you just included Westworld in that group of otherwise canceled shows. Michael Patrick King delivered hundreds of billions of dollars to HBO with Sex and the City, and the idea they canceled the day after the 2005 Emmys was beyond a tad askew in my mind. The Comeback and Enlightened were two cancellations that certainly surprised me because they went against what HBO has stood for.
You have situations with Westworld, with Vinyl, with The Comeback, with Enlightened, in terms of the dynamic between executives and the creative talent. There was a period in the past decade, though, where they became much more hands-on and, dare I say, intrusive, according to some showrunners. One great thing HBO did was give creators and showrunners a lot more autonomy and a lot more freedom than the networks. Was there a project where the two seemed furthest apart? You often expose tensions between talent and execs. It’s very frustrating for a network when they turn down a show and it becomes a huge hit. But I think all three of those could have been on HBO. Nobody can be in a position where they buy every hit, of course. They had the opportunity to read Matthew Weiner’s pilot, and I get into the whole story of what happened. The Crown was an obvious one, but Mad Men kept coming up. Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Crown are the big three. What decisions did you get the sense were most regretted? HBO has made some controversial cancellations, like Deadwood and Rome, and passed on some shows that went on to be big hits like The Crown and Breaking Bad. As a result, there’s a real fighting spirit. Now in this post-Netflix era, they’ve gone back to feeling like they are the underdog and some of them relish that. The second thing is that, much like ESPN and all of these places, HBO started from humble roots where they were the underdog. There were some similarities - particularly with ESPN in the sense that there were a significant number of people who have been there for 20, 25, 30 years, so long that when you’re trying to do a book of record, they warmed up and were incredibly helpful across the administrations. Lisa Joy on Why the 'Westworld' Season 4 Finale Isn't the HBO Show's Endgame
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