Come at the king … HBO changed TV forever, but is its crown under threat in the age of streaming and Trump?

It gave us Game of Thrones, The Sopranos and The Wire. But as HBO Max comes to the UK and with new ownership imminent, the network that reinvented television is fighting to stay itself It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” It might have seemed like a hollow brag at the time, but this aggressively assertive tagline marked the beginning of a new era in small-screen entertainment. The slogan was a statement about what the US cable network aspired to be but, also, a tacit rejection of what most television stil...

By Phil Harrison