What Ever Happened to HBO's Late-Night Documentaries?

It is a commonplace that the 1990s was a transformative period for television, not least because of (so the story goes) ground-breaking new production by the cable channels, with HBO at the forefront of the movement. In the early and mid-'90s this had TV critics treating HBO's made-for-television films like The Band Played On as cultural events, with the same attitude carrying over to its original series' like, of course, The Sopranos--the critical reception to which was so hyperbolic that the writers of Saturday Night Live satirized the reviewers as having become really and truly unhinged.

However, there were other sides to HBO's original production, like its documentary production, and especially its production of racy documentaries for the late night hours--in the years in which HBO was launching the "prestige TV" revolution with shows like The Sopranos it was also airing shows like Real Sex, and Shock Video: Turn on TV, and Taxicab Confessions. In contrast with its ballyhooed scripted series these are now little acknowledged and have apparently been withdrawn from availability to its subscribers for many, many years, such that the main legacy they seem to have left are scattered comments in Internet fora by people old enough to remember their original airings wondering "What ever happened to that?"

Going by the little I have seen about the matter it seems the managers of that particular media empire think the documentaries best left in the past--trash TV stuff that sits poorly next to their prestigious scripted fare, with this view encouraged by the lack of demand for the material. After all, what was salable in a period in which dial-up Internet was a new thing, and many were also too inhibited to delve into the adult offerings of their cable packages, was not so salable later, the more in as these shows tended toward what might today be called the "woke." As the name promised Real Sex was about "real sex"--what "real" people were doing, with what are now spoken of as "inclusiveness," "diversity," "body positivity" and "the centering of marginalized perspectives" all part of the package, such that when a particular episode promised, for example, a certain type of "party" what the viewer got looked very different from the treatment of the theme they would have found in conventional "adult entertainment."

The prospect of an occasional titillating image or scenario or other bit amid it all was enough to induce many a viewer to tune in anyway back then, but if far from tame it was also poorly positioned to compete in the milieu that quickly emerged afterward, especially when one remembers the misapprehension in the old adage that "sex sells." Specifically it isn't sex that sells, but sex-y, about which matter individuals tend to have very specific ideas, while also having very specific ideas about what may be sex but is also decidedly un-sex-y, a buzz-killer for which they are apt to have very low tolerance, with the marketing of pornography indicative of the fact. In contrast with most sellers of fiction, who face the challenge of enticing a potential audience to buy the product without giving away the surprises that are part of the pleasure of the experience with "spoilers," the sellers of porn (you can even see authors adhere to the principle when selling self-published "erotica" at the big online book retailers) very pointedly explain exactly what is in the product. The least unseemly way to put it may be to say that they spell out exactly who will do what to whom, as retailers of the stuff index their wares so as to make them conveniently perusable by those searching for specific situations, specific physical attributes of the performers, specific acts--finding items containing exactly what they want to see, and not including what they do not want to see. (Indeed, it can seem that where the prevailing feminist-conservative orthodoxy about the subject emphasizes the ways in which pornography is supposed to create tastes of a kind they deem unhealthy or worse, no part of the entertainment industry caters so specifically and minutely to audience tastes as this one, with all it implies about a more complex dynamic between the audience and the industry's products than we usually hear about at the very least.) Real Sex et. al. was thus at rather a disadvantage in the age of Pornhub, all as HBO seemed unlikely to win any plaudits for having from a certain standpoint being "ahead of its time"--certainly not enough of them to compensate for the dissonances with the image the outlet's leadership has endeavored to cultivate the past quarter of a century.