Judd Apatow imagines a terrible world where Ballers is the only TV show

Last year, in an attempt to further dilute the once invaluable HBO brand, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery (the geniuses who decided to flood Max with Discovery Channel trash rather than leaning into the quality and prestige generally associated with HBO) decided to start licensing some of the premium cable network’s shows to Netflix—including Band Of Brothers, Six Feet Under, and Sex And The City. The move has introduced more people to great stuff like Insecure, sure, but it also been accused of being a somewhat shady way to squeeze money out of these shows without necessarily looping in all of the people who are initially involved.

Now, in an interview with Vulture, Judd Apatow has brought up another problem with this: Why would anyone ever make a new TV show when they can pay less money just to get someone else’s TV show? He said it’s a “scary thing,” as someone who makes television (Love, Girls, Crashing), to know that these streaming services are saying, “Wait a second. We don’t need to spend $200 million on a new show. We can just bring back Barnaby Jones.”

Apatow then envisions a world where Netflix just buys shows from HBO rather than making new ones, and then at some point HBO just buys Netflix shows instead of making new ones, and then “it’ll just be passing around all the episodes of Ballers for the rest of our lives.” Apatow blames this on the fact that “corporate behemoths and people from the tech world” are “taking over creativity,” have turned everything into “content,” and have “diminished it as much as it possibly could be.”

Apatow even goes on to say that he wouldn’t be surprised if he “read something in the paper that Pornhub bought Paramount+.” Hey, Paramount is supposedly on the market, and there are probably worse parent companies out there. Does anyone know if Pornhub deletes popular videos as some kind of tax write-off or dilutes the value of prestigious programming by selling it to competing websites?