At HBO, the bonfire of the vanity projects

HBO, so bulletproof when it was in the midst of two signature series, “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” has seen its image and its ratings suffer lately from a string of semi-flops or fizzes: “The Comeback,” starring Lisa Kudrow; “Unscripted,” from the executive producer team of George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh; and “Entourage,” starring three unknowns and Kevin Dillon evoking the early Hollywood life of the show’s executive producer, Mark Wahlberg. Still to come is “Extras,” a series debuting Sept. 25 about movie extras starring Ricky Gervais, co-creator/star of the BBC hit “The Office.”

OK, so maybe the pay cable network’s comedy development has become oddly myopic, evoking that scene in Robert Altman’s “The Player” where studio executive Griffin Mill draws a laugh when he asks his lunchmates: “Can’t we talk about something other than Hollywood for a change? We’re educated people.”

Surely, HBO remains an enviably profitable machine, and when you hear about an upcoming series such as “Rome,” about the ancient empire, starting Aug. 28, and the Tom Hanks-produced “Big Love,” about a polygamous clan in Utah, starting in the fall, there’s still the fleeting notion that we’ll be getting something bigger than a mere TV show, somehow.

The unhurried, uncorrupted approach to making and airing series television is part of HBO’s lore. As the narrative goes, that system is what made possible innovative series like “Deadwood” and “The Wire” and allowed “Sex and the City” to become a risque crowd-pleaser. As a result, HBO, whose subscriber base stands at roughly 28 million, has become the network of choice for high-powered Hollywood talent.

But maybe being the network of choice for high-powered talent is its own kind of trap.

The ultimate model for the HBO auteur is not David Chase, a respected series creator but not at the top of anyone’s list before HBO picked up his oft-rejected pilot of “The Sopranos”; it’s Larry David, who was fabulously wealthy after the success of “Seinfeld” and came to HBO to film a little special on his return to stand-up comedy. That little special ended up being about the fear of doing a special. The special about the fear of doing a special led to a series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” about being Larry David.

Which is roughly where the trouble began. Because David, seemingly just by virtue of being himself, made it all look so easy and self-evident and, most especially, creatively rewarding, he made getting a semiautobiographical show on HBO feel like the ultimate expression of the freedom to do what you wanted to do.

Power playing

AS the network’s cachet has grown, there are grumbles that HBO has gotten more leverage in the traditional demand for first position on the writer of any pilot scripts it buys. That means a writer, once he’s sold a script idea to HBO, is less free to get other work around town, with rival studios and networks worrying that his or her services will no longer be available should HBO decide to order a series.

David, of course, didn’t need to worry about this, nor do the stars and creators -- Wahlberg, Clooney, Kudrow, “Six Feet Under’s” Alan Ball -- of the network’s current series, for whom HBO is more like taking a break between movies to do summer stock theater.

The fifth season of “Curb” debuts Sept. 25 to an audience now awash in knockoffs, like so many copycat memoirs about tortured childhoods post-”Angela’s Ashes.” This month and next, across the dial, get ready for Pauly Shore’s “Curb,” and Kathy Griffin’s, and Howie Mandel’s.

But HBO has both the gold standard and the series that seems to have brought the genre to a tipping point, Kudrow’s “The Comeback.”

It’s not exactly “Curb,” because Kudrow doesn’t play Kudrow -- she plays her doppelganger, Valerie Cherish, a character who seems to be suffering, week to week, every indignity that can be known to an insecure and once-famous B-level sitcom actress.

Comedy is hard, so the pairing of Kudrow, hot off of “Friends,” and Michael Patrick King, hot off his run as head writer of “Sex and the City,” seemed like the kind of deal only HBO gets to pull off. But the brittle reaction to the series has betrayed a certain pent-up frustration among critics and viewers about the genre as a whole, and it has left HBO in a position to which it is not accustomed: on the wrong end of a television trend.

In recent weeks, “What’s wrong with HBO?” stories have popped up in the press about its programming slump and downturn in viewers, if not profitability (a Wall Street Journal story, citing a source that had HBO making a whopping $1.1 billion in profit last year, said 20% of its revenue is now generated by ancillary businesses, most notably DVD sales).

Like any network, then (say, NBC), HBO finds itself living off the fumes of past hits (they’re sweet fumes, mind you, with A&E; reportedly buying syndication rights to rerun edited episodes of “The Sopranos” for a record $2.5 million each). The jaded view is that the “It’s Not TV” tagline now seems less a distinction of class than a haughty boast that doesn’t hold up, quite.

It’s lost its way by going too inside Hollywood, the chorus goes, but HBO has always been inside Hollywood and in fact has benefited from the image, dating back to the critical and cult-hit evisceration of showbiz, “The Larry Sanders Show.”

And for every 100 viewers alienated by “The Comeback” or “Unscripted,” another A-lister who wouldn’t do television under any other circumstance (e.g., Sarah Jessica Parker) signs on to develop a show there.

Great expectations

It’s not TV, it’s a creative-writing class for the famous. Write what you know. At HBO, where the mantra has long been that the executives leave you alone, stars have used the freedom to unburden themselves about -- guess what -- being a star. So Clooney, the movie star, spearheads a show that harks back to Clooney, the workaday actor, trudging to auditions. Kudrow, the sitcom star, dares to lampoon the pedestal of “Friends” with a character who is an insecure hack, aging out of the business.

But the perception that HBO has made a wrong turn isn’t likely to abate at this week’s semiannual gathering of TV critics, where HBO will be talking up the Sunday night pairing of Gervais’ “Extras” and the new season of “Curb.”

“It is very possible to have success create a mind-set where you are trying to measure up to an idea that is actually created by people talking about you than about you doing the work that you did,” HBO Chairman Chris Albrecht was quoted by the Associated Press recently.

I think he meant what comedian Bob Odenkirk meant when he told The Times four years ago: “My biggest fear is that they’ll develop a brand. If you attract this whole big crowd of people, you’re going to want to keep them. And to keep them you have to give them what brought them there” in the first place.

Odenkirk paired with comedian David Cross on the old HBO sketch comedy series “Mr. Show,” back when the network seemed more in the discovery business, and when not knowing what “Six Feet Under” or “Curb” was all about was to feel left out of a conversation. Getting Ricky Gervais is a coup, I guess; at this point he’s an undeniable talent. But that move has now come to feel so HBO -- less exhilaratingly counterintuitive than just whom you’d expect the coolest network in town to be able to land. HBO needs to remind us of its ability to identify and nurture a TV series that becomes a new kind of presence in the culture. Put another way: It should give someone I haven’t heard of a shot.

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Contact Paul Brownfield at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.