It’s HBO day here at the TCAs, and new programming president Casey Bloys kicked off the morning with clips from upcoming shows like Westworld, Insecure, and Divorce, and announcing their premiere dates. He then opened up the panel for questions, where he was asked about everything from the failures of Vinyl to Project Greenlight (shrugging, “maybe it was too inside baseball”) to (unsurprisingly) the future of Game Of Thrones.
In the good news category, Bloys announced that “David [Milch] is writing the script” for the upcoming Deadwood movie and “I feel good about it,” giving fans still longing for Deadwood closure something to cling to. Another throwback, Curb Your Enthusiasm, is definitely returning, as Bloys said HBO is “talking to Larry [David]” so that the show could start shooting “possibly this fall, to air in ’18.” (HBO‘s Amy Gravitt soon corrected this statement at the beginning of her comedy panel, confirming that the cantankerous one will actually come back in 2017.) As far as which cast members will return, Bloys vagued, “My hope is most of the cast, but we don’t have any of those details worked out yet.” He also has not closed the door on True Detective, saying, “It is not dead!”, ostensibly leaving open the possibility for a season three.
More specific were the details on the delayed Game Of Thrones’ return, which will take the show out of the running for next year’s Emmy consideration. Bloys opined, “It’s always best to win more Emmys,” but “that’s not the main goal.” Since the series depends on “shooting in a cold climate,” the wait is “just something we’ll have to live with.”
Bloys was asked if there was any hope for a female-led talk show at HBO, to which he pointedly responded, “Not a plan, but a desire. It’s a valid point” about the need to have “somebody other than white men in late night.” HBO is going forward with a new season of Vice News Tonight, which will debut in “September or October” and “look like a Vice version of a newscast.”
Also on the news-ish front, Jon Stewart is working on an animation project for HBO, which Bloys described as “Cable News Network with an Onion-like tone.” You would think that it would be tough to pull off an animated news show, but apparently in today’s animation world, Bloys assured that this would not be a problem.
The HBO exec deflected questions about the firing of three longtime Sesame Street cast members (“I don’t know enough about it to comment”). He then tried his hardest to deflect a series of questions about HBO’s various depictions of violence against women, in Game Of Thrones, The Night Of, and the Westworld pilot. Bloys attempted to cast off the criticisms by pointing out that the violence is prevalent everywhere on TV—citing castrations on GOT, for example—saying, “We’re going to kill everybody!” But as the number of questions related to the subject rose to four, Bloys eventually ceded, “Point taken.”