My friend Lawrence O’Donnell writes for The West Wing, created the show Mister Sterling for NBC, and has written for CBS. Of network and studio executives generally, he explains, “They’ll say things that couldn’t have made sense even to them, to fill the air.” But with HBO, “you never leave a discussion shaking your head.” This year he wrote a pilot script for a show set at a cable-news channel, and even HBO’s reason for passing—its glut of inside-showbiz series—seemed perfectly reasonable to him. “I would only want to create a show for HBO. That’s what everyone wants unless they have their eye on billion-dollar syndication money. If you’re someone who thinks you can survive on $2 million a year,” he says, only half-jokingly, “HBO is the place.”

But just as HBO has become a victim of its own success in terms of competition and buzz, it is also a victim of its singularly art- and artist-friendly M.O. Its programming strategy of lavish minimalism—airing only a few series at a time, launching only a few new ones a year, producing half the usual number of episodes per season—vastly increases the odds of creating great shows. (It also helps that HBO allows ten to twelve days to shoot an episode of Deadwood or The Sopranos, instead of the network-standard eight.) Back in 2001, though, new episodes of at least one of its most-chattered-about series were almost always airing. The big buzz wave never had a chance to crest and crash. Then gaps started appearing in the schedule. Last spring, Sex and the City ended, and Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos began hiatuses of fifteen months and almost two years, respectively.

No normal network would give any producer or star such a long leash. When I asked Albrecht about the absences, it was the one time during our conversation that he groped for an answer. “Different guys want different things,” he said. “I don’t know what to do to change that dynamic, [and] I think it’s a benefit to us more in the long run . . . David [Chase, the creator of The Sopranos] said, ‘I need to take some time and reinvigorate.’ . . . Believe me, we tried to influence Larry [David to make new shows sooner], but the more you try to influence Larry, the less you influence Larry.”

Happily, redemption is probably just around the corner. The chattering class is actually starting to chatter about Entourage. At the end of the summer, HBO will begin airing Rome, a $100 million, twelve-hour series set in 52 B.C.; judging from the first episode, it is the finest sword-and-sandals epic ever made. (ABC’s preemptive ripoff was the deeply cheesy six-hour series Empire, set in 44 B.C.) In the fall comes Ricky Gervais’s blithely dark comedy Extras, in which he plays a shameless movie extra, as well as the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Big Love, which premieres early next year, will be the Six Feet Under of HBO’s next epoch, the show with which the channel’s yuppie core audience can most easily identify. Instead of a surprisingly normal family of undertakers, it’s a surprisingly normal family of schismatic Mormon polygamists—Bill Paxton as a home-improvement superstore entrepreneur living with three wives (including Jeanne Tripplehorn and Chloë Sevigny) and seven children in Utah. The pilot made me want to see more. And The Sopranos’ sixth season will finally get under way in March.

Every few years, the triumphalist right rattles its swords about defunding public television, and they’ve been at it again. PBS was created with the grandest intentions in the sixties: Wouldn’t it be swell to have a smart, enlightened national channel that was sheltered from the ratings-crazed, lowest-common-denominator bazaar of the advertising-dependent networks? But 36 years later, we understand that this country is simply incapable of sustaining a government-funded world-class public-television service. Which is a disheartening and very modern-American failure, but there it is; get over it. There are more important battles with the right to fight.

Besides, the market, in its imperfect, helter-skelter way, has been addressing the problem. When PBS started, there were no cable channels—no Nickelodeon, Animal Planet, or Discovery; no C-span, BBC America, IFC, or Sundance.

And no HBO. Forget all the weird, sexy HBO series that PBS even in its heyday would never dream of making. But in a more perfect world, wouldn’t PBS have made Band of Brothers, Rome, and HBO’s forthcoming John Adams mini-series? In fact, two of this year’s original HBO films—Dirty War (terrorists set off a radiological bomb) and Sometimes in April (the Rwandan genocide)—were broadcast on public television, because HBO gave them away as an act of noblesse oblige to poor PBS.