by Jacob Harrington, Contributor

On May 23rd, as the ongoing Writers Guild strike reached its fourth week, HBO Max became Max. They took it to the max. The Directors Guild (DGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) are negotiating their respective contracts and a possible triple strike looms at the end of June. The ads Warner Bros Discovery have pushed out for the new app rollout would have you believe it’s some long awaited and welcome solution. Everyone else with half a brain knows it’s an extremely dumb idea championed by corporate executives and bean counters desperate to squeeze money out of a wet rag and please Wall Street. The best parallel example is Disney+ dropping the Disney and becoming +. It makes no sense.

There is a lot to be said for how tech companies buy and merge entertainment companies into each other, but it’s always bad. It always results in job losses, the rich getting richer, and something being lessened as a fish gets gobbled up by a bigger fish. AT&T buying Warner Bros in 2018 was a bad idea. It did not take long for AT&T to realize that running a nearly century-old movie and television studio was a lot different than running a telephone company. At the same time, many figured the merger would only hurt HBO as a brand in the long run. AT&T eventually sold WB to Discovery, a company that mostly makes bad reality TV. Here we are now.

HBO has a large catalog consisting of a lot of the best TV shows ever made. Prestige dramas, comedies, made-for-TV movies, limited series, and documentaries. It’s a brand that has made an immense amount of high-quality entertainment. Discovery and its brand of trashy reality television are the opposite—a weighed down abundance of shows that have no business being paired with the prestigious libraries of HBO or Warner Brothers. I am not an industry insider or a Hollywood executive. I am pretty bad at money. My knowledge of this situation comes from being a nerd who watches a lot of TV. So, full disclosure—maybe I’m wrong—but I think this is an astonishingly stupid branding mistake by an entertainment company. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, thinks it’s a great idea and has forced us all to go through with it.

On April 27th, the app formerly known as HBO Max premiered the first three episodes of Love & Death, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons. Based on an affair that lead to a murder and subsequent highly publicized trial in 1980, it’s popular in the world of true crime and had already been made into a show with last year’s Candy starring Jessica Biel. Love & Death was written by David E. Kelley, who has had a lot of success producing shows for HBO in the past few years. Clark Johnson of The Wire directed two episodes, while the other five were directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, the current president of the Directors Guild of America—we will come back to why that’s important.

The show is about how a steamy affair between two church going, buttoned up people that explodes into a brutal axe murder. All the performances are great across the board. Olsen and Plemons have great chemistry in the early episodes before things go bad. The supporting ensemble is made up of Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Krsyten Ritter, Tom Pelphrey, and Bruce McGill as a thunderous no nonsense judge. The early rush of the whirlwind affair is exhilarating and sexy; the fallout of the axe murder and how it rocks this small Texas community and the two families directly affected by it is nauseating.

The first six episodes premiered on HBO Max. The seventh, and final, episode premiered on Max, a totally different app. Same streaming service, but a different app. HBO is a valuable, prestigious brand. Discovery isn’t in the same league. Pairing these two content libraries together doesn’t make any sense. They come with different viewer sensibilities and different audiences. This corporation is pretending it does so they can make more money, but it really is a mismatched and bizarre pairing. On the Max app HBO is under a category called “brand spotlights.” It is worth noting that a lot of the ads for Max featured clips from Love & Death, with Elisabeth Olsen’s character saying, “think of this as a new beginning.”

When the Max app launched it took people a few hours to spread screenshots and sound the alarm on Twitter about how the app credits were listed for writers, directors, and producers. That is…how it didn’t. For example—Raging Bull’s page was the first instance I saw someone detail on Twitter. There is a line for the actors that make up the principle cast, and then a line that says “creators.” Under creators were, in order, Peter Savage, Martin Scorsese, Mardik Martin, Robert Chartoff, Paul Schrader, Jake La Motta, and so on. Just all lumped together as “creators.”

People who work in all corners of the industry were not happy about this. It will likely take a long time to correct. It could result in legal action. Warner Bros. Discovery has insisted it was a mistake, a technical oversight, all manner of excuses and denials. I think it was done on purpose, with the precise intention of blurring the line between scripted and unscripted programming and what “creators” contribute what specific aspects to each show or movie. It was done to devalue these job’s specific contributions behind the scenes. People spent months building this app. They had to code how credits would be presented. There is just no way something like this happens as an accident. Someone in charge of a lot of other people told them to do it like this. If they didn’t, and it just happened by mistake (impossible), the executives and leadership behind this decision are all the more incompetent for not catching this. They are going to fix it because they got caught, but damage is already done.

Now, a week after Max was unleashed upon the world, the creators tab is still there. Writers and directors and producers all get categorized and credited as creators in the info for each show/episode/movie. For Love & Death, Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed five of the seven episodes, is often the second person listed. Clark Johnson, who directed two episodes, is not listed at all, even on his episodes. David Kelley, who created the show, writing every episode, has no consistent placing.

By the Wednesday after launch, the Directors Guild of America had put out a strongly worded statement completely condemning Warner Bros. Discovery by name. The statement reads as follows:

For almost 90 years, the Directors Guild has fought fiercely to protect the credit and recognition deserved by Directors for the work they create. Warner Bros. Discovery's unilateral move, without notice or consultation, to collapse Directors, Writers, Producers and others into a generic category of 'creators' in their new Max rollout while we are in negotiations with them is a grave insult to our members and our union. This devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it. We intend on taking the strongest possible actions, in solidarity with the WGA, to ensure every artist receives the individual credit they deserve.

A triple strike between the WGA, DGA, and SAG-AFTRA would bring all production to a screeching halt. The DGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts are up on June 30th. The Writers strike seems contingent on what happens with the other two unions. All three are negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). You can read lots of great coverage of the strike and the writers’ demands by people who are much better writers than I am—who have much more thorough knowledge of the industry and the nuances of the strike than I do. I do think the AMPTP will lose and I unequivocally support the writers in all of their demands. The future of the industry is at stake, and the time for changes to happen is right now. Executives at the tops of these companies pivoted to streaming, made boatloads of money, gloated about their stock prices going up and up, and refused to adequately pay the people who actually make these things.

It’s also worth noting that outrageous credits issue aside, Max’s launch was anything but smooth. Streaming service apps all have their various bugs. When you try to rewind a few seconds on Prime or Disney+ you might accidentally restart whatever you’re watching. People had to download a new app because on many devices it didn’t switch over. People now have to click and scroll through way more titles to get to what they want to watch. More and more isn’t a plus. It’s just more. It’s particularly strange that Warner Bros. Discovery leadership pushed this change through the week two of their biggest shows aired their series finales, Succession and Barry. An enormous amount of streaming movies and television show were released in 2022 and the first half of 2023. Peak TV is over. That was the end. It was starting to wind down, then the pandemic happened. The strike is the definitive end. It’s looking like it might be HBOver.

I also think it was a really disastrous and short-sighted move to give Lesli Linka Glatter, the director of Love & Death and the president of the Directors Guild of America, a highly specific motivation to strike. I can’t speak for her, of course. I do not know how she feels about this, other than the statement the DGA put out. But it seems poorly thought out to premiere six episodes of a prestigious miniseries on one app, and then move the show to another app for its final episode. It seems even more poorly thought out to change the president of the DGA’s credit on their show from director to creator.

If the DGA does go on strike on the first of July, I think this situation might have something to do with it.