Walking the Sydney tunnels for some HoT D (House of The Dragon)
On Saturday at 5pm I joined a large group of House of The Dragon fans to check out an activation staged by the HBO Max team in Australia.
The activation used the same space in the Wynyard tunnels that was occupied just a few months ago by a Netflix activation to promote the final season of Stranger Things.
As I walked through the installation, the similarities were pretty hard to ignore. Mostly I just found myself comparing and contrasting the two.
The HoTD activation felt a little more textured and larger in scale, but there were two elements holding it back.
The activation itself just seemed a little tonally off. It felt more like a horror version of HOTD and didn’t quite feel like the show. Admittedly, I have only seen the first season, so maybe there was a major vibe shift that I’m not across. Even so, I always liked that the Game of Thrones show and its spin-offs felt more tactile and real than most fantasy dramas. This activation felt more like what one would assume the show is without actually watching it.
The second thing was that the Netflix Stranger Things activation was smart in that it used the tunnel walk with all of its ‘spooky shit’ as a secondary concern. The main event there was a spooky 80s era KFC serving up 80s-era menu staples. That was a smart and cool brand tie-in.
There’s limited brand tie-ins one could make while still remaining faithful to the HoTD IP (outside of maybe a bazoomer.com sponsorship). But, with tickets limited to people aged 15+, there was always the potential for a series-appropriate bar or similar to win over ticket holders.
Yeah, it was a free ticket, but the bar has been raised so highly by these events now that I think the promotional events need to always take things to the next level.
Regardless, it was pretty cool.
Some photos:
RIP James Burrows - TV’s most famous director?
There are not many TV directors who have become household names. TV, traditionally more of a writer/producers medium, generally leaves its directors unsung outside of a credit on the episode.
James Burrows was a household name. Maybe not the most-discussed of household names. But he had cut-through.
A well-deserved legend built up around Burrows, which led him to be seen as one of the most vital, successful creatives in US TV comedy. His career took him from learning the craft on MTM Productions shows through to working on Taxi where he met the Charles brothers, Les and Glen. Together the three went on to create the underperforming, TV failure Cheers. Or at least, that was the narrative in its first season.
We all know Cheers eventually found its audience and went on to become one of not only TV’s most successful shows of all time, but also one of TV’s most critically-beloved shows of all time.
Burrows was instrumental to that success. He had a deft hand with talent and did a great job to find the chemistry with a cast and make the show sparkle on screen. Even if the only thing he was ever known for was Cheers, that should be enough. Go and watch what he did with the pilot of that show… the term masterclass gets used too often, but this pilot absolutely qualifies.
Here’s the opening scene of the episode:
And then the next scene where Sam meets Diane:
The 236 episodes of Cheers he went on to direct were pretty good too.
He then went on to become the go-to director for sitcom pilots. It wasn’t a sure thing that sitcoms would go on to tremendous success if Burrows was directing. It wasn’t even a sure thing that the show would go on to be greenlit. But the chances of success were seen to have included considerably if Burrows was on board. We don’t remember Conrad Bloom, Chicago Sons, or Union Square. But we all know Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Newsradio, Will & Grace, Third Rock From The Son, Two and a Half Men, and The Big Bang Theory.
From the NYT obituary:
“The laughter behind me is so rewarding for my soul, I would almost do it for free,” he told The Times in 2023. “And it’s nice to be able to go back to what happened to me 50 years ago and still have this feeling of creativity. When pilot season comes this year, I hope there is a pilot that I like.”
The great The Agency burn-off
Where is the publicity for The Agency? Outside of a couple of articles on the UK’s Radio Times in my RSS feed this morning, it has been tumbleweeds.
Season two of the very good spy thriller was released on Paramount+ over the weekend with all ten episodes now streaming. Season one was released with new episodes week-to-week.
This feels like Paramount+ is burning off episodes of a show the current executives have no appetite for. It was a hugely expensive drama commissioned by the previous administration. I liked the first season a lot and if this plays out like I think it will, in a few months time when Paramount+ announces its cancellation, maybe I’ll need to finally bite the bullet and watch the French original The Bureau (AKA Le Bureau des Légendes).
Australia’s Howard Stern wannabe
Australian media is facing killing fields right now with a number of companies announcing layoffs of teams ahead of the end of financial year (June 30). There are also the tectonic plates shifting beneath the industry with the impact of the shift to digital/rise of AI really being felt.
It is all being felt this year more than at any other time that I can recall. None of that is exactly unique to Australia. But what is perhaps interesting about it is that it is happening at the same time as we are seeing some of Australia’s biggest name talent making the shift to the creator economy.
Recently we saw the launch of The Karl Stefanovic Show, a podcast with a strong emphasis on YouTube distribution that has the longtime host of Today hosting a politically right to far right podcast where Karl is one part David Frost, two parts Joe Rogan as he shamelessly panders to the ‘quiet Australians’ out there.
Politically this is interesting as one assumes it is this same audience that is supporting the rise of the One Nation party, with its own far right ideology. I’m not prepared to suggest that Karl is responsible for the increase of support of One Nation, but rather the same dissatisfaction with Australia’s political options is fuelling both.
Why mainstream, politically neutral network Nine still has Stefanovic on air is questionable.
Also this week you have the One Nation-supporting, but more entertainment-orientated Kyle Sandilands newly-free from his lawsuit against former radio home ARN, where he hosted one of Australia’s number one rated breakfast shows on our local Kiis station.
He’s now out to set up his own digital venture where he plans to live-stream a version of his former radio show for four hours every day, from 6am to 10am. While Kyle seems to be thinking of this still in an audio context, he will also be streaming it as video. Expect it to lean more on video the deeper Kyle gets into this.
He’s planning on a subscription model, which suggests an owned and operated platform. Ultimately, he’s making the bet that like his radio hero Howard Stern, he can bring his audience with him to a paid platform.
Here’s audio commentator James Cridland writing about the economic realities of Sandilands making the move:
The radio world is littered with people who left commercial radio, and believed their own hype enough to try and launch a subscription service. Here’s just one, from 2005. It’s fraught with difficulty - not least, the rights issues around playing music, which Sandilands says is going to be part of the show. Howard Stern was successful in his move from FM to satellite radio; but he was one channel in 150.
Sandilands says he needs 50,000 paid subscribers to cover costs. We don’t know the subscription fee he is planning, but if it’s a $4.99 subscription fee, that’s (AUD) $250,000. The show will also, he says, be ad free (though that doesn’t mean it won’t carry sponsorships or other brand activity).
Across all platforms, KIIS in Sydney and Melbourne had 1.1 million listeners each week for breakfast. Kyle’s show on KIIS had 96,000 online listeners a week. Would half of those pay to listen to Kyle instead? Would some of the 291,000 “listeners” to the podcast also pay up? (His investors apparently think that he could get 500,000 or even a million).
Good on Sandilands for taking a big bet on himself. My initial assumption is that he won’t be able to generate the sort of expected subscriber base as he’d ideally like. But… if he can keep the show reasonably accessible in terms of its focus, I can see a scenario where Kyle can develop an international audience. A 6am Sydney breakfast live stream delivers a drive-time 4pm Audience on the US east coast and a late night 9pm audience in the UK. That could work well for him.
A million subscribers globally? That’s not completely out of the question.
News Desk
Aubrey Plaza’s animated comedy Kevin, about a cat searching for identity/a home where he feels wanted, has been mercifully put down by Prime Video after just one unfunny season. Read: Deadline
Netflix has won the bidding war for the feature film rights to Sesame Street. It was a three-way bidding war between Netflix, Warner Bros, and Universal. The first Sesame Street live-action film Follow That Bird holds up as a pretty entertaining feature, so the bar has been set… Read: THR
Judge Dredd co-creator John Wagner has been awarded an MBE in King Charles III's Birthday Honours for 2026. Read: Bleeding Cool
James Wan will direct multiple episodes of the upcoming RoboCop TV series. Read: World of Reel
Ni surprises in THR’s reporting on the reason Netflix dumped The Buroughs after one season: The audience wasn’t high enough to justify the cost of production with limited wriggle room due to bad blood at Netflix stemming from the Duffer Brothers defection to Paramount. Read: THR
Event Cinemas parent EVT has inked a deal with Korea’s CJ 4DPLEX for a further four ScreenX auditoriums across Australia and New Zealand. They’re set to open by year’s end with Bondi Junction marked as one of the locations. It will bring the number of ScreenX auditoriums in Australia to sixteen. Read: IF
Jeremy Clarkson says his prostate cancer is in remission just days after announcing it to the world. Read: Deadline
A 3D CGI animated series based on Pippi Longstocking is in the works at StudioCanal. Read: THR
Peacock has made a straight-to-series order for a live-action series based on the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG books. Read: Dark Horizons
Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot has died following a plane crash in France. Read: Polygon
That’s the newsletter for the today.
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