Word: hbo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...City of Cambridge signed a final license with its cable television company last week, meaning that most local residents could be watching HBO and MTV in their homes within a year...
...episode of HBO's new sitcom 1st & Ten opens with a shot of two comely lasses soaping themselves in a locker-room shower. Their endowments are on full display and duly noted by two football jocks ogling them from the doorway. The casual nudity may be startling to some viewers, especially since it has nothing to do with anything that follows. But for veteran watchers of cable TV series, such obligatory "skin scenes" are old hat. Their purpose is not so much titillation as information. The message: This is cable, folks, not network...
...partly a response to the industry's rough economic times. Cable's growth rate has slowed considerably in the past couple of years, owing in part to the proliferation of videocassettes, which offer new movies months before they appear on cable's premium channels. The two largest such channels, HBO and Showtime, actually posted a net loss in subscribers during the first half of 1985, the first such drop in their history. The solution, many pay-cable executives are deciding, is to supplement movies with original programming that can generate viewer loyalty. Translation: more series...
...have more than just a few good movies to make subscribing worthwhile." < Showtime hopes to attract and hold subscribers with such regular items as Brothers, about a homosexual and his two siblings; the long-running drama The Paper Chase; and a batch of "rediscovered" episodes of The Honeymooners. HBO, while downplaying the importance of series, this season will offer six new segments of Philip Marlowe--Private Eye, starring Powers Boothe, along with the new episodes of such returning series as Not Necessarily the News and The Hitchhiker...
Cable's freedom from network restrictions, however, has also given rise to more ambitious fare. HBO last summer anticipated this fall's anthology trend with its fine Ray Bradbury Theater, three original stories by the famed fantasy writer. The tales were seductive and creepy (in The Crowd, a man notices that the same group of bystanders shows up at car accidents across the city). Three more episodes are scheduled for this season. Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theater on Showtime, meanwhile, continues to provide imaginative family fare. In December, Duvall will launch a second Showtime series, Tall Tales, which will...