The L.A reports that includes...
... “Taxicab Confessions,” the documentary series “Real Sex” and “Cathouse,” which chronicled life in a Nevada brothel, and specials featuring adult film star Katie Morgan... [and] adult feature films....
"Taxicab Confessions"! That doesn't seem to belong in the set, and not just because I love it and don't care at all about the rest.
“Over the past several years HBO has been winding down its late-night adult fare,” an HBO representative said. “While we’re greatly ramping up our other original program offerings, there hasn’t been a strong demand for this kind of adult programming, perhaps because it’s easily available elsewhere.”...
HBO developed and launched most of its adult programming in the early 1990s when the internet was still nascent and the network was not yet a major producer of prestigious scripted series such as “The Sopranos.”...
“It really is a vestige of a previous era,” said Jones, co-author of “The Essential HBO Reader.” “Especially the more soft-core stuff that gave HBO its mantle of ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO.’ You weren’t finding those shows unless you subscribed to the Playboy Channel, and most people did not want their wives to know that they watched that stuff.”...
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36 comments:
It would be interesting to compare the revenues of pornhub to HBO.
That's okay. We always have CNN. I just watched a montage of their people saying David Pecker over and over again.
There are legions of unnecessary and distracting f-bombs on Netflix, but I can find little actual simulated fucking. Perhaps I'm not watching the right shows.
@Ralph
Watch Shameless.
Soft porn fit the zeitgeist of the Clinton era.
Skinenamax was always the best channel for that kind of fare anyway. Though, Real Sex was a great docuseries.
The best thing to do if you catch your husband watching porn is to give him a blowjob.
I guess too many motels offer free wifi now.
I love the way this "vestige of a previous era" bookends your Deep Throat story on Judge Sweet.
specials featuring adult film star Katie Morgan
I watched a few of her HBO episodes. She was pretty, especially when naked, and was quite amusing.
Men are “people”
Shameless is great. It's got a little bit of everything.
I remember when we first got HBO in the 70s. You got this little box with dials on it, that you attached to the top of your TV. They showed a movie, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar", starring Diane Keaton and a real young Richard Gere. Ms. Keaton played an innocent school teacher by day, and club-hopping slut by night.
Anyway, in one scene, Ms. Keaton took off her top, and my initial reaction was, "Well, this dark, dreary movie just got a heluva lot better!'
In other news, raffish youths become stodgy middle-aged curmudgeons. With at least one LGBT subplot, natch.
Hasn't Showtime filled the gap with soft-core adult fare that's heavy on the "dirty talk"?
I guess some people like to listen to that while they jerk off.
Maybe all this gives Showtime a leg-up on acquiring the next Louis C.K. comedy special?
Memories!
"Real Sex" was one of the prime causes of the codification of Hoodlum's Third Law: "It's Never Who You Want to See."
Did Real Sex show nudity and "strong sexual content?" Yes, undoubtedly. Were the people shown engaging in that behavior young & attractive? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. You (as a young person sneaking in late-night HBO viewing) want to see sexy girls (and guys, I guess) in the nude gettin' it on...but that's definitely not what you get. The same goes for nude beaches, gals poppin' their tops off at the motorcycle show, and so on. It's never who you want to see.
I think "Hookers On The Point" was HBO as well.
That one I remember 'cause the prostitutes would use the phrase "you goin' out?" about 1000 times per show (both to solicit Johns/ask if someone wanted to buy sex and to each other to ask if they were going to start working/prostituting).
A few short years later I was at college and the young women there would ask each other "you goin' out tonight?" many times a day Thurs-Sat and several times I had to prevent myself from giggling at the association.
/story
There's been a sea change with nudity. In the past, when an actress took off her clothes it signified that she was free from the Puritanical restrictions that so hindered Americans in their pursuit of happiness. Now the supposition is that the actress has been bullied by the director or whoever into taking off her clothes. Nudity is now more a signifier of exploitation rather than liberation......I fear for the next season of Game of Thrones.
I can't remember the comic but there was a funny bit about HBO winning prestigious awards, polishing their image as a prestige brand, and taking themselves seriously as an artistic producer today despite their origin as down-market flesh peddlers. That was several years ago--I guess the current management got wise. Or Woke. Whatever.
It’s a natural progression in the subscription cable universe around the world. In the early days, they carry a metric butt load of porn and erotica. Once they reach a certain key number of subscribers, the product becomes more tame. More mainstream. They take away your box of tissues.
Canal + in France used to be nonstop porno. Now it’s completely respectable. HBO doesn’t need porno when it’s got shows like Game Of Thrones. Lots of titty AND a storyline. Very respectable. Thrones was notable for having at least one hardcore porn actress in a key role that also included titties and doing it with a dwarf. You don’t see THAT on pornhub! Or on the Laslo Channel.
- Krumhorn
Oh! And there's a great bit at the end of a David Spade set (I think it's "Take the Hit" but can't look it up right now) where he talks about coming home drunk late at night and turning on HBO. He sees the "strong sexual content" warning, cheers/gets excited...and then "Real Autopsy" starts up. His closing line is something like "hey, guess what? I can't whack off to Autopsy, ok? ...or can I...?"
Anyway "Take The Hit" is a great set. Lots of people dismiss Spade as a smarmy C-movie actor but he had some solid standup back in the early 90s and his timing opposite Farley was terrific.
I can’t watch Hollywood cable content anymore. It’s all soft porn, with contrived pc plots featuring the mandatory Heroic Gay Character, and Emancipated Female Super Hero who talks like a sailor. Meh.
I do like foreign series on Netflix— Spanish series, Turkish, Indian— where they aren’t as indoctrinated.
It doesn't help that so much of that content isn't available in HD, but in old SD formats that aren't upgradable.
I'm also guessing that much of that content is moved over to the Cinemax brand.
True story: when my brother and I were teenagers my parents had cable. The cable company had just introduced wireless remote boxes, but only for new subscribers. My parents had a wired remote in their bedroom, and it was already a dinosaur. My mother took all of her cable equipment down to the office and demanded new wireless boxes or she would cancel her subscription. The customer service rep felt her pain but said there was nothing they could do. A manager pulled my mom aside and suggested a loophole: the only way to get The Playboy Channel was with one of the new boxes. So sign up, get the new boxes, and then just cancel Playboy in a few days. My mom went along with it.
About 3 months later my parents finally remembered that they needed to cancel the subscription to Playboy Channel. But not before my bother and I had recorded dozens of VCR tapes full of programming for later enjoyment (at the time, they only aired 3 hours of programming per night, and just repeated it on a loop). It was an eye-opening time in my youth.
To be fair, when The Playboy Channel first came out, it was all soft-core stuff, about what you can watch on Skinemax today. A lot of "video centerfolds" and some odd programming that just sort of shoehorned nudity into things like game shows.
"Game of Thrones" is not porn?
If you say so.
Maybe this had something to do with it
Sorry, bad link above! Here’s the plaintext:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsXInOPxgjY&feature=share
Rich,
LOL! My father bought a satellite dish in the Summer of 1982- one of those big ones (13 ft diameter). I discovered The Playboy Channel the day it started up later that Fall on one of the communication satellites further to the east than the one that contained most of the contemporary cable channels (MTV, HBO, CNN etc.). In those days, the feeds weren't encrypted.
It was a pain, but I would go outside and hand crank that dish all the way over to the "Playboy" satellite late at night, and when my parents got their first VCR later that Winter started making recordings for myself and my friends.
William said...
There's been a sea change with nudity. In the past, when an actress took off her clothes it signified that she was free from the Puritanical restrictions that so hindered Americans in their pursuit of happiness. Now the supposition is that the actress has been bullied by the director or whoever into taking off her clothes. Nudity is now more a signifier of exploitation rather than liberation......I fear for the next season of Game of Thrones.
You are correct.
Season 2 of Westworld demonstrates your point. Season 1 was full-frontal nudity on close-up display. In Season 2, the first nudity we saw was several episodes in and it consisted of a roomful of robots waiting for repair heaped in a pile. And all the actors were older and fat. When we get to see Evan Rachel Wood nude again, it was late in the season and she was filmed at a distance and her image occupied 1 or 2% of the screen. (OK, maybe 4 or 5%.) But you get the point. The showrunners decided to head off controversy, rather than confront it. BTW, this was the way that got a lot of press because actors were given a contract right up front where they had to agree to full nudity anytime the showrunners requested it, in exchange for higher salaries. Refusing to sign the agreement resulted in the end of the hiring interview.
So much I missed not having a TV. I do have Veep 1-6 on DVD which is good. Pols talking dirty metaphors.
So much I missed not having a TV
You don't need a TV if you have a computer. Plenty of link sites that allow you to watch almost every TV show in the world.
@Krumhorn - "Thrones was notable for having at least one hardcore porn actress in a key role that also included titties and doing it with a dwarf. You don’t see THAT on pornhub!"
Oh I'm sure you can find that on Pornhub. So I've heard, anyway.
I'm watching Oceans 8. Let's put together a crew for the heist. A black woman? Check. An Asian (Chinese) woman? Check. A trans woman? I haven't gotten that far, but I wouldn't be surprised.
"Earlier this summer, HBO quietly removed erotic adult movies and TV shows from its channels and streaming services."
GOOD! About time.
Yancy Ward said, "Hand crank". Heh.
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