HBO wants TV to feel like TV again. At an HBO press presentation in New York, HBO and HBO Max Content boss Casey Bloys laid out why the network is leaning into what he calls The Pitt model — and yes, it’s exactly the opposite of the current streaming mindset.
The Pitt model, in plain English
- 15-plus episodes per season
- A full-on network-size budget
- A new season every year (no two-year gaps)
Bloys was blunt about why this worked for them: habit. Not just the weekly rhythm, but the yearly rhythm too — the thing TV used to be built on. Fresh off The Pitt winning five Emmys in its first season — including Outstanding Drama Series — he’s clearly seeing a path back to a more episodic, wide-canvas kind of storytelling.
"The annual return is really, really important. That kind of habitual viewing, not only week to week, but on an annual basis, is really important in terms of setting habits."
Bloys’ pitch: build worlds that can feed 15 hours
His argument isn’t subtle: streamers like Disney+, Netflix, and Apple TV leaned hard into short, serialized seasons, and in the process drifted away from the episodic engine that powered traditional TV. If you want 15 compelling hours, you have to design for it from the jump — think a premise that naturally generates stories (the way hospital and cop shows used to), then hire people who actually know how to make that machine run.
He also pointed out something industry folks don’t love saying out loud: cranking out 15 strong episodes is a different muscle than crafting eight to ten. After a decade-plus of prestige mini-season thinking, fewer writers and showrunners have been trained to do the former.
So what does this mean for Max originals?
HBO Max Head of Originals Sarah Aubrey told Deadline she’s open to more originals built around this kind of storytelling, but she’s not trying to jam everything into one template. Translation: expect shows that fit the story first — not a rigid formula — but with a clear appetite for series that can sustain more episodes and an annual cadence when the concept supports it.
Remember when TV wasn’t just a long movie chopped up?
There was a time when you’d flip on HBO and land in a random episode that still worked on its own terms. Streaming shifted the culture to bingeable, hyper-serialized runs — think Loki or Silo — with eight to ten episodes, 40–60 minutes each, often spaced out in rollout just to keep the buzz going. Stranger Things has made an art of stretching that drip-feed.
Bloys nodded to the old days of 26-episode seasons as a reminder of where TV came from, and makes the case that rediscovering some of that DNA (not 26 episodes, but more than eight) is how you rebuild weekly and yearly habits. If he’s right, we could see more shows that give you a fresh story beat every week without losing the bigger arc.
The bottom line
The Pitt’s success — five Emmys, including the big one — gives HBO cover to bet on longer seasons with annual returns. If other streamers take the hint, we might finally get a break from the eight-episode movie-in-disguise trend. Until then, The Pitt is out there doing the thing, and it’s currently streaming on HBO Max in the U.S.