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Entertainment

Laid-Off HBO Max Execs Reveal Warner Bros. Discovery Is Killing Off Diversity and Courting ‘Middle America’

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Former HBO Max executives say the streaming service has been left with few people of color to oversee its diverse slate of programming as Warner Bros. Discovery continues its ongoing corporate reshuffling.

The platform reportedly laid off close to 70 people this month. That includes the entire teams overseeing unscripted, kids and family, and international content, according to two former HBO Max execs who asked not to be named.

Those three divisions, responsible for buying shows from production companies and creators and working closely with them during production, are now completely gone.

One former employee says as many as 13 people of color previously in charge of developing shows like The Gordita Chronicles and the Spanish-language docuseries Menudo: Forever Young have been let go, likely influencing the types of shows and movies that are greenlit moving forward. Among those laid off are Jen Kim, an Asian woman who served as the senior vice president of the international team, and Kaela Barnes, a Black woman who worked under Kim.

“I don’t think anyone knows just how white the staff is,” one former executive told The Daily Beast.

Former HBO Max staffers say there are barely any non-white people left in the upper ranks of content, with one naming Joey Chavez, an executive vice president of drama, as one of the few people of color still there. Because HBO Max and the original HBO channel operate somewhat independently, one former executive conceded that “there may be one Black woman on the HBO side. Maybe.”

The layoffs have “amplified the lack of diversity at HBO,” another former executive told The Daily Beast. “HBO is the most homogenous part of this umbrella. Instead of trying to figure out how to integrate some of the [Max] executives into HBO, they just made this sweeping cut of three divisions: kids, family, and international. A lot of Black and brown people lost their jobs.”

Ever since parent company Warner Bros. merged with Discovery earlier this year, employees at Warner have grappled with the changing values of the newly created company. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was charged with helping Warner crawl out of a $50 billion hole. He came in like a wrecking ball, tearing up CNN’s $300 million streaming service CNN+ and vowing to pull the Warner-owned news channel away from “advocacy” journalism.

More changes have come in the past couple of weeks.

Earlier this month, it was announced that Batgirl, the $90 million film planned for HBO Max starring Afro-Latina actress Leslie Grace, would be shelved completely in favor of a tax write-off. Over the weekend, CNN media correspondent and host Brian Stelter, a frequent target of right-wing criticism, was fired from the network.

Former Warner employees believe these changes are just as much about business as they are about reshaping the ideological perception of Warner properties. It all points to the same end, they say: A rejection of left-wing or highly diverse content in favor of more homogenous, Middle America-friendly fare. The lack of diversity in content staff might just make that goal easier.

“HBO is the most homogenous part of this umbrella. Instead of trying to figure out how to integrate some of the [Max] executives into HBO, they just made this sweeping cut of three divisions: kids, family, and international. A lot of Black and brown people lost their jobs.”

In a statement to The Daily Beast, HBO highlighted shows like Euphoria, Rap Sh!t, A Black Lady Sketch Show and Los Espookys, all of which are led by diverse characters.

“HBO and HBO Max have always shown a commitment to diverse programming and storytellers, and always will,” the company said.

An internal graphic comparing the audiences of Discovery+ and HBO Max showed a stark demographic difference between the two streamers. Where HBO Max is popular with diverse groups, single people, and drivers of hybrid cars, Discovery+ is popular with white, married people who drive SUVs, minivans, and “traveling buses.” HBO Max viewers are on TikTok and Instagram, while Discovery+ viewers use social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, with the added caveat, “if any.” HBO Max viewers have no kids. Discovery+ viewers are either “empty nesters” or have grandchildren. Discovery may be trying to pull HBO into its orbit as it focuses on what it does best.

HBO Max’s reality offerings presented an obvious sticking point for the new bosses. Where Discovery properties like TLC and HGTV send camera crews out to film what they can find, HBO Max’s offerings are more carefully crafted. They’re sometimes buoyed by stars like Selena Gomez or Steph Curry, who have the power to command big paychecks, and they’re noticeably sleeker, with smoother edits and more complicated camera set-ups adding to their budgets.

One former exec describes Discovery+ as a “more general audience platform that doesn’t have the specificity that HBO Max was tailored to. I think Discovery is just a very ‘all’ audience, [they] don’t wanna make things that are political, topical, alienate Middle America—more Chip and Joanna,” they said, referring to the home renovation show Fixer Upper: Welcome Home hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

“If David Zaslav had his wish, he would just program Chip and Joanna all day long,” the executive said. “There was just a massive, ‘We don’t need you. You’re not offering the things we’re focused on.’”

The change in perspective could also partly explain why so many titles have recently disappeared from HBO Max’s platform. Our sources agree that the removals are mostly related to money. The company can claim a tax break for the costs associated with certain shows as long as it promises to stop profiting off them, which means taking them down altogether.

“They’re canceling a lens of perspective that I don’t think exists when you look at Discovery-branded shows,” one former staffer said.

Speaking of the company’s plans to combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into one giant streaming service in the near future, the laid-off exec said: “Don’t be surprised if there’s a new name for the platform.”

Overall, there’s a sense that HBO Max’s executives of color were just another casualty in the company’s quest to get itself out of debt, content quality be damned.

“In terms of people seeing themselves reflected, whether it’s ethnic or LGBTQ, when you have people who are diverse, the lens with which they evaluate [content] factors in things that I think my white colleagues just don’t think about,” one former executive said.

“It’s deep,” said another. “What are they going to do with this disproportionate amount of people of color that were let go? They need to replace them in some capacity. Or do they not care? That’s what we’ve been told, that they just don’t care.”

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Entertainment

‘Batgirl’ Directors Tried to Pirate Movie Before HBO Max Locked Them Out of Servers

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The creators behind HBO Max’s Batgirl say they were so stunned by the streamer’s decision to scrap the movie that they tried to log onto the server and record their work on a cellphone before their access was quickly revoked.

Directing duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah recounted how they learned the “shocking” and “painful” news in a video posted to their individual Instagram accounts Wednesday afternoon.

The movie was one of two upcoming feature-length projects that were sacrificed as the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery undergoes a vast corporate restructuring. By canceling and shelving the film, the conglomerate is able to write it off as a loss and lower its tax burden while it focuses on its sky-high debt.

In an interview for the YouTube channel SKRIPT posted on Monday, the directors said Warner execs assured them “it was not a talent problem from our part or the actress, or even the quality of the movie.”

The abrupt cancellation disappointed fans who were eagerly awaiting another entry in the DC Extended Universe. Shot entirely in Glasgow, to the chagrin of some local businesses, the film was also expected to serve as a star vehicle for singer Leslie Grace, who appeared in the pandemic-delayed musical In the Heights to positive reviews.

“I didn’t even realize that was a possibility,” El Arbi says of HBO Max’s decision. “It was as if we were [making] movie history right there.”

As previously reported, the directors—who were born in Belgium—were in Morocco for El Arbi’s wedding at the time. In Wednesday’s video, Fallah stops to acknowledge the terrible timing: “Congratulations, bro,” he tells his creative partner.

“I didn’t even realize that was a possibility. It was as if we were [making] movie history right there.”

When they got the call, Fallah was in Tetouan visiting his grandparents’ grave, while Fallah was an hour away in Tangier, enjoying his on-site honeymoon with his wife.

“Thank God that my beautiful superhero wife was there with me to support me through this time,” El Arbi says.

The duo were still putting the finishing touches on the superhero flick, they revealed, adding that they were missing all the visual effects and hadn’t yet completed the necessary re-shoots. With both of them out of the country for what was supposed to be a celebration, they tried to get ahold of all their footage before the studio locked them out of the remote server that held their movie.

“I called, right away, Martin Walsh, the editor, and said, ‘Yo, you gotta pack up that shit, you know, backup—copy the movie,” El Arbi says.

Bilal adds: “Then Adil called me and said, ‘Yo, yo, shoot it on your phone!’ So I went on the server and everything was blocked.”

El Arbi quickly apologized for his unsuccessful attempt at “piracy.”

“That was not the right thing to do, but I was panicking, you know,” he says.

When the axing first became public, a source close to the directors told The Daily Beast that it was all due to money. The film was conceived as a direct-to-streaming movie, meaning that the production was far less flashy, though not that much less expensive, than that of a theatrical film. It’s a strategy that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav finds very little justification for, considering that putting movies online draws significantly less revenue than putting them on the big screen. That’s a problem, because Zaslav is charged with lowering Warner’s $50 billion debt, a priority that has led to massive layoffs at HBO Max and the outright removal of many shows from the platform as it pursues more tax write-downs and the slashing of residuals.

“It’s the final fuck you to Jason Kilar. This is not about art, it’s about financial engineering,” a source told The Daily Beast earlier this month. “It’s not a $90 million movie, it’s $60 to $70 million,” he added, disputing the reports about the movie’s total cost. “It was built as a small movie for the streamer. To do it theatrically, they’d have to spend another $40 million in special effects and making it bigger, and even more money in marketing and distribution.”

Grace, for her part, addressed the cancellation in an Instagram post on Aug. 3.

“On the heels of the recent news about our movie ‘Batgirl,’ I am proud of the love, hard work and intention all of our incredible cast and tireless crew put into this film over 7 months in Scotland,” she wrote. “To every Batgirl fan – THANK YOU for the love and belief, allowing me to take on the cape and become, as Babs said best, ‘my own damn hero!’”

A few industry insiders will be lucky enough to get a sneak peek of the Batgirl cut at secret “funeral screenings” on the Warner Bros. lot this week, according to The Hollywood Reporter.



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Entertainment

“Genredoms,” “male skew,” and other dumb stuff from today’s HBO Max/Discovery+ merger

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Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

After days of taking precision hatchet shots to the library of his own streaming service, HBO Max, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav went in for the kill today. Talking to investors, Zaslav revealed on a Q2 earnings call his plans to smoosh together HBO Max and Discovery+ into one big, mushy ball of content that absotively, posilutely, won’t have any Batgirl movies on it.

Let’s be honest: It’s never great, PR-wise, when the graphics or language from these sorts of earnings calls—which by their very nature boil all art and entertainment down into a thin slurry of financial credits and demerits to be fed into the ever-hungry maw of The Investors—make it out into gen-pop for wider discussion. But Zaslav’s presentation has come in for some extra special mockery online today, especially for a slide that purports to show the differences between the two streaming services that will now by bridged by their forthcoming unholy spawn.

HBO Max, we are told, is “male skew,” “scripted,” “lean in,” “appointment viewing,” and, of course, “home to fandoms.” Discovery+, meanwhile, is “female skew,” “unscripted,” “lean back,” “comfort viewing,” and “home of genredoms”—which we’re pretty sure is when a classic science fiction novel slaps on the ol’ sex jeans and gives you the Christian Grey treatment. The “fandom” vs. “genredom” thing is mostly inscrutable, but we get the sense that folks mostly wouldn’t have roasted the slide too badly if Zaslav hadn’t opened with the whole “male skew” versus “female skew” thing—especially since a) we can name any number of HBO Max shows with passionate female audiences (and vice versa for Discovery+), and, b), all the descriptors for Discovery+ seem precision-engineered to annoy the hell out of any passionate fans of pop culture, like, say, the people who genuinely care about your poor, bedraggled streaming service, David.

Zaslav also posted a slide of the various assets from the paired streaming services, including a “franchises” entry that includes Harry Potter, the DC Superhero films, and, of course, the 90 Day Fiancé Universe, a vast cosmology of TV products about marrying people in less time than most people spend with a toothbrush. (Wait, should we be changing out our toothbrushes more often?)

Which is mostly dumb, but not necessarily a bummer. But never fear: Zaslav had a slide for that, too. Specifically, he had one describing all the alleged money-losing sins perpetrated by his predecessors, including CNN+ (which has now also been absorbed into Discovery+). The humdinger, as it were, is this line item (emphasis ours): “Approved additional spend on projects with uncertain financial returns including Kids & Animation, CNN+, certain Turner originals, and select direct-to-HBO Max feature films.) God forbid a studio spend money on TV or films with “uncertain financial returns,” but, don’t worry: Zaslav has a solution. Here’s a quick tip, kids: If someone tells their investors they’re “restructuring” the “content portfolio” of your job, it’s probably time to get some cover letters prepped. The company’s CFO later confirmed on the call that a decent chunk of the company’s kids and animation projects were on the chopping block.

Amidst all the carnage, Zaslav and his team also laid out a timeline for the merge of the two services: We can expect them to relaunch as a single entity in Summer 2023, no name or price points announced. The hybrid service is expected to launch in both ad-free and ad-supported forms.



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World

The Horrors of Growing Up in a Pedophilic Sex Cult

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Cults are terrible, but few have been quite as monstrous as the Children of God, whose founder David Berg not only espoused the usual drivel about an impending apocalypse and his own status as God’s prophet, but also preached a doctrine of pedophilic sex abuse. In the audio recordings and cartoon-decorated literature (known as “Mo Letters”) that he sent to his communes around the world, Berg promoted the belief that sex was love, that love was God, and thus that children should have carnal relations with each other, and with adults. The result was an environment of horrific rape and exploitation whose details are nothing short of stomach-churning.

Discovery+’s five-part docuseries Children of the Cult (Aug. 21) pulls back the curtain on this nefarious organization (currently known as The Family International), which was founded in 1968 California by Berg, a former Christian missionary whose evangelical-pastor mom instilled in him a shame about sex that he’d later rebel against, twistedly, via his free-love-with-kids creed. In the few photos and videos that exist of him, Berg—with his big white beard and lunatic eyes—comes across as a veritable caricature of a deranged cult leader. To his acolytes, however, he was “father” and “grandpa,” and his regular Mo Letters and audio tapes were diligently and hungrily consumed by the faithful, given that they dispensed instructions about the latest and greatest guidelines on which devotees should base their every waking moment.

Children of the Cult affords a platform for the stories of many Children of God victims, with three—Hope, Verity and Celeste—taking center stage throughout. Their narratives are the stuff of nightmares, since unlike their parents, who willingly bought into Berg’s New Age-y bullshit, they were born into the cult, and were thus from the start cut off from most knowledge of, or interaction with, the larger world. Theirs was an isolated existence in which outsiders were viewed as enemies intent on opposing God, and doomed to perish during the inevitable rapture. As they recount, their upbringing involved being bombarded with warnings about straying from the path by having contact with secular society—a fact that was hammered home by cult-produced music videos like “Kathy Don’t Go to the Supermarket” (which has to be seen to believed), and was underscored by the 1993 drug-overdose death of former Children of God member River Phoenix, whose fate was treated as a cautionary tale for those thinking about leaving.

Through the recollections of Hope, Verity and Celeste (as well as other survivors, albeit not Rose McGowan or Joaquin Phoenix, who were also born into the Children of God), Children of the Cult details the systems of control and propaganda employed by Berg. Chief among his methods was a practice known as “Flirty Fishing,” in which young female cult members were ordered to entice men to join a commune by having sex with them—thereby making them de facto cult prostitutes. All women were expected to partake in such business, and to agree to “family sharing” schedules that laid out who was supposed to sleep with who on a given night. This naturally created quite a bit of tension in certain communes; as former member Sandy recalls, it led to the worst year of her life, when she was just 19 and her husband was forced to watch her have sex with others. Yet it was part and parcel of a Berg ethos that condemned individuality and demanded conformity (to the group, and himself) at every turn.

Hope, Verity and Celeste’s commentary is brutally candid, revealing the numerous horrors they suffered at the hands of their elder tormentors, be it Hope’s stepfather David Lincoln (who raped her from a young age) or Celeste’s father Simon (who made her one of the stars of his Music with Meaning propaganda media apparatus). Such accounts are unbelievably tough to take, as are the cult videos and literature presented by Children of the Cult. From unnerving movies of kids singing about, and marching in, “the Lord’s Army” at a detention camp—where rebellious teens were taught to toe the cult line or endure corporal punishment—to excerpts from a comic known as “The Story of Heaven’s Girl” that included a chapter titled “She Can Gang-Bang’m” (which celebrated its heroine’s sexual ability to win the hearts of new followers), the material on display is shocking enough to frequently elicit gasps.

“Hope, Verity and Celeste’s commentary is brutally candid, revealing the numerous horrors they suffered at the hands of their elder tormentors…”

Nothing in Children of the Cult’s first three episodes (which were all that was provided to press) is more nauseating than passages from a book disseminated by Berg about the lifelong sexual training of his adopted son Ricky “Davidito” Rodriguez, which served as a manual for how to carry out pedophilic sex abuse beginning at infancy. Bolstered by ample archival audio, video and printed evidence, the series paints a damningly comprehensive portrait of a cult infatuated with sharing child pornography and carrying out the rape of minors. Authorities knew about the Children of God’s despicable conduct as early as 1971, when Berg was compelled to go on the run from the FBI and Interpol, who sought him on child abuse and kidnapping charges. Yet bringing his more heinous behavior to light proved, in the ensuing decades, difficult to achieve, as evidenced by Sandy’s early-1990s ordeal trying to expose the cult’s secretive deviance, which made headlines but hit a legal roadblock when cult members refused to stray from Berg’s deceptive talking points.

In discussions about the terminology concocted by Berg to foster an insular culture; in videos of a young Celeste dancing provocatively, and explicitly, for the camera (part of a repugnant VHS series that Berg commissioned for his own private use, although he also passed it around to various communes); and in anecdotes about the orgiastic environment in which young members were raised, Children of the Cult censures this ugly outfit from multiple, equally outraged angles. While its form is somewhat standard-issue, it’s a lucid and heartbreaking overview of cult structures and procedures, scary personal ordeals, and courageous fights for justice—the last of which is implied from the outset, via shots of Hope walking angrily, and defiantly, into a Scotland police station.

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Entertainment

HBO opens The White Lotus

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Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett in The White Lotus
Photo: Courtesy of HBO

Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, July 11. All times are Eastern.

Top picks

The White Lotus (HBO, 9 p.m., limited series premiere): Here’s Saloni Gajjar on this buzzy new series from the creator of Enlightened: “Created by Mike White, The White Lotus is set in an exclusive Hawaiian resort… The stacked cast includes Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, and Insecure’s Natasha Rothwell, who plays the resort spa’s massage therapist and forms a possibly unhealthy bond with one of her clients, played by the one and only Jennifer Coolidge. With each passing day, a darker complexity emerges in the lives of these seemingly picture-perfect travelers and cheerful employees.”

Read more about The White Lotus and other new shows coming to your TV this month in our July TV preview. Roxana Hadadi’s recaps will run weekly.

Wellington Paranormal (The CW, 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., U.S. premiere): Grab yourself some normal human alcohols and settle in to once again slip into the absurd world of camera-ready vampires and whatnot.

The CW, rightly eager to get into the Jemaine Clement/Taika Waititi business, snapped up this spinoff of their 2014 film What We Do In The Shadows, which as you might have heard already spawned another corker. Look for Danette Chavez’s review soon on the site.

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Regular coverage

DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow (The CW, 8 p.m.)
Kevin Can F**k Himself (AMC, 9 p.m.): A reminder that our coverage is following the AMC release schedule, rather than that of AMC+, so tonight’s recap will be for episode five, “New Patty.”
Rick And Morty (Adult Swim, 11 p.m.)

Wild cards

Run The World (Starz, 8:30 p.m., first-season finale): “A great deal of Run The World’s premise centers on the towering burdens placed upon Black women by society, within the Black community, and of course, the expectations they place upon themselves. Though the characters are imperfect, they continue to push back against society’s desire to humble Black women or make them feel grateful for positions and roles they’ve painstakingly earned… Run The World offers a lovely window into the lives of four Black women. It’s honest, witty, and at times heartbreaking. As in real life, the women at the center of the series know that they can hold on to one another when all else fails.” Read the rest of Aramide Tinubu’s pre-air review.

Shark Week (discovery+ and Discovery, running throughout the week): Shark Week is starting, and NatGeo’s Sharkfest hasn’t stopped swimming either, so this is a fine time to be a person who likes watching shark stuff on TV. Today’s highlights include Song Of The Shark (discovery+, 3:01 a.m.), the series premiere of Shark Academy (discovery+, 3:01 a.m.), and Tiffany Haddish Does Shark Week (Discovery, 9 p.m.).

History Of The Sitcom (CNN, 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., series premiere): This eight-part docuseries “reunites audiences with the television friends, families, and co-workers they grew up with while introducing cutting-edge comedies that are sure to be your next binge-watch.” Expect interviews with Norman Lear, Tina Fey, Lisa Kudrow, Kim Fields, Dick Van Dyke, Jason Alexander, Mel Brooks, and Ted Danson, among (many) others.

Professor T (PBS, 10 p.m., series premiere): Sound the cozy mystery klaxon, a British eccentric is solving crimes on the telly!

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