Of Sex and Premium Cable

Recently glancing back at premium cable's past two of the features that stood out were the premium channels' high fees, and how different some of their fare was, certainly in the 1990s. Certainly HBO and Showtime, especially in the heyday of their duopoly, laid great stress on their airing major feature films old and new uninterrupted by commercials, uncut and uncensored, with the new appearing here not much more than a year after they arrived in theaters, and often years before they would reach the over-the-air channels. There was their airing of certain sporting events, like major fights in an era in which heavyweight champions of the world were household names (as Mike Tyson most certainly was in these years). There were specials by the most celebrated stand-up comedians of the day. And so forth.

Still, there seems no denying the extent to which sex was a draw here, with the uncut and uncensored feature films just part of that. There was, after all, an abundance of low-budget sex-heavy fare unlikely to be broadcast anywhere else--the kind of films by way of which popular pin-ups like Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain became B-movie queens. There was the original production of similarly themed TV series' for HBO's sister channel Cinemax, and Showtime. And if the intent behind them was often sociological and the sensibility behind them what might today be called "woke" with all that implies about the content, the promise of titillation rather than intellectual curiosity about human sexuality was almost certainly what kept documentaries like HBO's Real Sex and Shock Video: Turn-On TV on the air.

Of course, those looking for sexy material could find it elsewhere. After all, sex appeal was far from absent even in over-the-air (and certainly basic cable) TV offerings, as nostalgia for shows from American Gladiators to Xena: Warrior Princess, from Baywatch to Bodyshaping, reminds one. (Indeed, if broadcast TV was then less frank and open about some aspects of human sexuality and more tightly censored generally, as the '90s-era moral panic over "sex on TV" also reminds one--witness the shocked reaction to a Seinfeld episode obliquely addressing a certain side of human sexual life--there is a case to be made that by the standard of conventional taste it was still much sexier than what we have now.) At the same time cable offered material on Playboy and the Spice Channel that was racier than anything on premium cable (such that jokes about stealing glances at their analog technology-aired and scrambled images, or characters' reactions to the scrambled channels mysteriously becoming unscrambled, were common in the comedy of the time). However, premium channels would seem to have occupied a middle ground between the two, which along with the comparative lack of uninhibitedness about requesting it (asking the cable company's functionaries for a porn channel is one thing, asking them for HBO another), was profitable for quite a number of years. Since that time --amid the rise of prestige TV, the rise of streaming and fusion of cable and streaming, the increased availability of sexual content via the Internet with all that it implied for that strategy, changes in gender politics--the overlords of the relevant media empires have found it convenient to not just put the reliance on such fare but even its memory behind them as if it never were as the folks at Warner Bros. Discovery, certainly to go by how they have withdrawn such material from their channels and streaming services entirely, now much prefer that we hear "Cinemax" and think of "HBOMax" rather than, as people used to call it (not always without affection), "Skinemax."