As a result of changing cultural, economic and technological factors, television always exists in a perpetual state of transformation. The fragmentation of the mass audience and the disintegration of the network oligarchy catalyzed the emergence of a multi-channel universe and niche cable markets in the post-network era. HBO, perhaps the most successful premium cable channel to emerge during the changing TV landscape, implemented a subscription-service economic model, enabling it to produce uncensored, commercial free content unavailable on broadcast television. HBO has since been labeled as the leading purveyors of quality, auteurist-centered TV. For this report, I analyze how HBO has been constructed in the realm of academic discourse. Using Enlightened and showrunner Mike White as a case study, I examine how the series conforms to and deviates from HBO's established brand and reflects the network's struggle to redefine itself in the post-network era. Ultimately, I aim to reveal the mythologized, idealized and manufactured culture of production at HBO and examine how journalistic discourse surrounding the series presents the HBO brand identity in a state of crisis and transition. / text

From 2001 to 2011, there were a number of significant changes, such as increased audience fragmentation and new media technologies, which impacted the television industry and continue to threaten the financial strength and success of cable television networks. The cable television industry employed branding as a major combatant to manage such challenges. Branding is the most important tool in the post-network era, yet networks use it in ways that challenge previously held scholarly assumptions about the cable television industry. Cable television network branding functions in two main ways – one as a performance intended for competitors, distributors, and other key industry players; and two as a means of rationalization, essentially a tool that network executives can wield whenever they want or need to justify a decision, action or behavior. Through interviews with television industry executives, attendance at major industry events and an analysis of trade publications, I examine the branding and promotional strategies of TBS, TNT and HBO. Industrial strategies in the post-network era are fragile and uncertain with regards to technology, partnerships, economics, programming and distribution. Thus, cable networks turn to branding as a mechanism to work through institutional, industrial, economic and technological issues that have been and continue to shift. In this analysis of how and why cable networks use branding, I explore the currently evolving post-network era and television’s future.

The choice of content and number of technologies that audiences view television with are increasingly expanding in the post-network era, leading those who use the medium to question its definition. In the wake of the Internet, online programming and streaming technologies, the death of television is frequently forecast.  Netflix’s 2013 release of their original online production House of Cards prompted popular media and trade journals alike to declare a revolution of television that would result in a paradigm shift of current production and viewing practices. House of Cards is esteemed for its distribution method and asserted advantages over traditional television by creators and executives surrounding the show, which calls for an examination of the specific practices that are dubbed ‘innovative’, as current television production practices have been put in place for years. The aim of this thesis is to shed light on the claims surrounding the series through production and textual analysis. Second-hand sources are used to gather evidentiary claims surrounding the production, and analyzed using historical poetics analysis with Jason Mittell’s complex television definitions in order to make comparisons of particular elements of the creation, production and distribution of House of Cards. Making these areas its starting point, this inquiry provokes larger questions of the future of online television programming in general, and its role in the death of television in particular.