HBO Updates on ‘Succession’ Spinoff, ‘True Blood’ Reboot, ‘Watchmen’ Season 2 & ‘Mare of Easttown’

Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer in True Blood - Season 3 -'Evil Is Going On'
Doug Hyun / HBO / Everett Collection

HBO and HBO Max content CEO Casey Bloys gave updates on several shows and potential spinoffs/revivals/reboots to come from flagship shows such as  Mare of EasttownSuccessionWatchmenSix Feet Under, and True Blood.

While confirming when House of the Dragon would return, Bloys hinted to Variety that despite the success of Mare, he intends to keep it a limited series, opting for creator Brad Ingelsby to continue his exclusive deal with the network with yet another crime-centric show for HBO.

“I don’t think so,” Bloys said. “I always say ‘never say never.’ When we started talking about doing a Thrones prequel, that was something that HBO had historically never done. I had some people internally saying, ‘This is crazy. What are you doing?’ That said, I think that there’s something about the universe that George created that lent itself to [spin-offs]. There’s a huge history, a lot of different families, a lot of different wars and battles. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s something in ‘Succession’ where you would go, ‘Let’s follow just this kid’ or whatever. It doesn’t seem like a natural thing to me. But if [creator Jesse Armstrong] said I want to do this, then I would follow Jesse’s lead.”

He said the same thing about a potential second season of Watchmen, showing no interest in bringing it back without executive producer Damon Lindelof. “Watchmen was so much his creation,” Bloys says.

Damon Lindelof Regina King Watchmen

Rich Fury/Getty Images

“If he doesn’t think there’s a story that he wants to put his heart and soul into, it’s hard for me to think that it would be worth doing. It was a very special limited series for us. I would put it in the pantheon of HBO greats. If Damon ever wants to revisit it, he knows that it’s an open door. But it is hard for me to imagine doing one without him.”

And while he was at it, Bloys decidedly crushed the potential for a possible Six Feet Under revival, which he confirmed was never really in the works. Although a new True Blood was considered, with the network even pumping out a few scripts, it says, “but nothing that felt like it got there.”

However, Bloys shared that there are a few shows still slated to arrive on the network, such as Bong Joon-ho’s TV adaptation of his Oscar-winning film Parasite, and The Palace, starring Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Andrea Riseborough.

“I will tell you, I saw the first day of dailies with Kate, and she just inhabits her character and is so good. So I’m excited about that,” Bloys says. “Comedy budgets got a little bit out of whack compared to how they perform. You’re going to see some contraction there. You’re going to see, maybe, reining in some costs in comedy across the board as an industry.”

Everybody knows that there’s been such an arms race in content in general, he continues. “There’s been so much competition for actors, writers, directors, stage space, and materials,” he says. “Everything has gotten so expensive. With a drama, even at that higher expense, they tend to move the needle a little bit more.”