In preparing for the Emmys—Hollywood’s annual reminder that summer vacation is almost over—we here at Little Gold Men scanned the uber-long list of nominees and noticed a seemingly eternal Emmy truth: HBO rules. For the tenth consecutive year, HBO leads the Emmys pack, this time with 101 nominations, including 24 for the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks-produced miniseries The Pacific. Also, the network’s popular vampire drama *True Blood—*Alan Ball’s guilty-pleasure riposte to *Twilight’*s chaste teens—earned its first major-category nomination, for Best Dramatic Series. But that’s par for the course at HBO, a network that essentially changed the landscape of television with its successes, from vanguard hits like The Larry Sanders Show to cultural touchstones like The Sopranos. After a period of looking for “the next Sopranos” (and possibly finding it in True Blood), HBO once again can look ahead to a bright future, especially with this fall’s highly anticipated debut of Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire, boasting a pilot directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. That kind of consistency suggests that something other than luck is at work here, and it got us wondering: What’s in HBO’s secret Emmy sauce? To find out, we called up Michael Lombardo, president, HBO programming, to see if he’d tell us what exactly it is they put in the water over at HBO. Lombardo chalks up the network’s success to one simple rule of thumb: Work with the best. “We really have the good fortune or the smarts to do business with the right people,” he says, “because, as much credit as we’d like to take for those nominations, they really reflect the talent we do business with.” In addition to Scorsese, Michael Mann is directing the pilot of Luck, David Milch’s horse racing drama with Dustin Hoffman; and Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow is directing the Oscar-nominated writer John Logan’s pilot for Miraculous Year. Still, it’s one thing to say you should work with the best; it’s another to get the best to work with you. “Richard Plepler [HBO’s co-president] and myself have been very mindful since we took these jobs three years ago to hearken back to the days of what brought us here—that creative environment where talented people did their best work.... Our experience has been when you create an environment like that, people want to come and work here.” They do, indeed. The attitude around Hollywood these days is that if you have complex, fascinating material—i.e. the kind that studios rarely take a chance on at the box office anymore—there could still be a place for it at the Home Box Office.

The question remains how to create and maintain that environment. According to Lombardo, it’s all about the writing: “We start with an unmitigated respect for writers and the written word. You can talk to any film or television writer and hear their experiences both in the big screen and smaller screen universe, and they’ll give repeated examples where they feel like their voice got muzzled, muffled, muddled by input, rather than supported. What we’re looking for is writers who have a distinctive voice, a unique perspective, a strong story-telling sense, to let them do their best work.” That sounds simple, but film and television development is a notoriously tricky task, especially when it entails exhorting those same distinct voices to achieve their best. “Our approach with the writers [and directors and producers] we do business with, is to understand from them what they’re trying to do with their show and keep them on course, and to challenge them when we think they’re getting off course from where they want to be with the show. We’re not a place that develops by consensus or by committee That’s why we don’t ‘focus group’ our shows. That’s just not the business we’re in.... We’re not looking to be shows that get the biggest number of eyeballs in the world, we’re not selling ad space.” In other words, HBO’s status as a pay-cable channel frees it from the need to please advertisers worried about selling toilet paper, and though Lombardo hesitated to embrace edgy-for-edgy’s sake, he felt,“If something was edgy in the pursuit of honest story-telling, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have a home here.”