In summer 2016, Richard Plepler flew to Dallas to attend a business dinner with a relatively new contact of his named John Stankey. The two men could not have appeared more dissimilar. Plepler, the urbane C.E.O. of HBO, was a natural creature of Manhattan and Beverly Hills, who had helped turn the premium cable network into perhaps the most pre-eminent cultural product in American life. Stankey, on the other hand, was a career AT&T executive who had once overseen the business solutions and operations departments. He had since segued into media, however, and been placed in charge of the telecommunications giant’s freshly acquired satellite-television service, DirecTV. Stankey approached the new space steadfastly. He had invited Plepler from New York to his country club in order to discuss the details regarding an unprecedented agreement they were hammering out: AT&T and HBO, then owned by Time Warner, were on the verge of striking a first-of-its-kind deal in which the network would be included in DirecTV’s new streaming bundle, DirecTV Now.

Before the two men placed their dinner orders, Plepler started in with a soliloquy about the various glowing attributes of HBO—the channel’s strength as a boutique hitmaker and creative haven whose emphasis on quality above quantity had bestowed upon the world shows from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones, and created the current era of Peak TV. But Plepler didn’t get very far before Stankey stopped him in his tracks. He already knew what made HBO so special, he told his guest. “I said to myself, this is one smart fucking guy,” Plepler recalled recently when he relayed the anecdote to employees. “I knew from there that we were going to be off to a great start.”

Two years later, as a result of the never-ending AT&T-Time Warner combination, Stankey has gone from being Plepler’s suitor to becoming his boss. (On Thursday, despite the deal’s closure, the Department of Justice announced it would appeal a federal verdict that approved the sale.) Subsequently, the media world has become endlessly fascinated by how a professional manager, and leading executive of a mass-scale behemoth, will oversee Plepler’s boutique cultural gem. It’s a crucial moment for HBO, after all, as the network continues to withstand pressure from Amazon and Netflix, among others, which poured a combined $10.5 billion into the space last year. (HBO's budget is around $2.5 billion.) Whereas HBO once essentially had first right of refusal in the business, Netflix, with its 130 million paid subscribers around the world, has proved willing to spend hundreds of millions for the exclusive right to work with top-notch creators from Shonda Rhimes to Ryan Murphy. “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us,” Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, once famously said. For many, the daylight between the two is increasingly becoming imperceptible. This week, Netflix broke HBO’s 17-year streak of racking up the most Emmy nominations. At the same time, it has essentially become the big-box store of streaming TV, while HBO remains bespoke.

That explains the wave of hysteria that followed a recent article in The New York Times disclosing comments Stankey made during a June 19 town hall at HBO headquarters, where he was interviewed onstage by Plepler. “It’s going to be a tough year,” Stankey said at one point. “It’s going to be a lot of work to alter and change direction a little bit.” Stankey never mentioned Netflix by name, but he seemed to insinuate that HBO could learn a thing or two from its top competitor. HBO, he suggested, had to think beyond owning Sunday night. He discussed it effectively as a mobile widget. “We need hours a day,” Stankey said at another juncture. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.” He also said: “We’ve got to think about how, over time, we start to build [HBO] so that it’s broad enough to make that happen.”