Hbo

Chris Cillizza [ "Worst Week in Washington," Outlook, June 10] chided organized labor for ignoring a crucial lesson about power: "If you come at the king, you best not miss. " The quote is attributed to a character from the TV show "The Wire," but in fact a version of that saying long predates HBO. The quip originally came from a 19th-century exchange between legal scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Holmes, then a young man, wrote an essay criticizing Plato and showed it to Emerson, whom he considered an...

Sooner or later, often in response to a personal crisis or a birthday ending in a zero, a relative gets the genealogy itch and off he goes, vanishing down the bottomless hole of Google and Ancestry.com searches, returning occasionally to breathlessly report census mentions and ocean crossings. Before you know it, there's a road trip to visit some cemeteries. Great fun, except when it isn't. "Family Tree," HBO's wobbly yet tender new comedy co-created by Christopher Guest, both honors and satirizes the impulse to...

Here's one scene that did not make it into the epic HBO miniseries on the life of John Adams that ends tonight. It is June 23, 1775, and members of the Continental Congress accompany George Washington as he sets off to command the provisional army outside Boston. Adams rides along, then returns to his Philadelphia digs and writes in self-pity to his wife Abigail: I "must leave others to wear the Lawrells which I have sown; others to eat the Bread which I have earned -- A Common Case.

HIGHLIGHTS Saturday night, "Louis C.K.: Oh My God" (HBO at 10) features the comic debuting all new material at a show in Phoenix. New docu-series "Life With La Toya" (OWN at 10:30) follows La Toya Jackson — described as the "wild card" of her famous musical family — as she strikes out on her own. Vince Vaughn hosts "Saturday Night Live" (NBC at 11:30) with musical guest Miguel. Sunday night, six-part docu-series "The 80s: The Decade That Made Us" (National Geographic at 8)

HBO will sell ?The Sopranos,? ?Sex and the City,? ?Deadwood? and ?Rome,? ?Flight of the Conchords? and ?The Wire," among others, on the iTunes store. All 94 episodes of "Sex in the City" will be available (a mere $187 for the whole run!) at $1.99 each while more popular shows like the "Sopranos" and "Deadwood" will cost $2.99. HBO is also trying tosellstream its content on a website called HBO on Broadband . However, this move monetizes the service completely, allowing even non-subscribers access to HBO content.

Premium TV channel HBO was quick to dispel any notion of forming a partnership with video rental service Netflix, the company said today. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings insinuated that his company could possibly form an agreement with HBO — either through a future content licensing agreement or content distribution deals — in its Q2 2012 letter to shareholders Yesterday. In the letter, Hastings wrote: "While we compete for content and viewing time with HBO, it is also possible we will find opportunities to work together –...

From simple concepts can come complex consequences. Such is the case with "The Black List," a 90-minute HBO documentary that, despite its title, has nothing to do with alleged communists being ostracized during the Cold War. No. The names on this "black list" are "some of today's most fascinating and influential African Americans," as HBO says, and the documentary is officially subtitled "Volume 1," because the men and women on tonight's premiere are...

"The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" debuts Monday night at 9 on HBO, and will be telecast throughout August. The Post's Marc Fisher reviewed the documentary when it premiered at the Silverdocs festival this summer, and wrote that the film features "the same old Barry patter, the smooth charmer trying one more time to wriggle out of trouble. . . . Yet there is honesty and truth in this account of Barry's mysterious hold over Washington through nearly its entire history of self-rule.

Chicks are back, accessible is back, fun is back at HBO. The network, which just wrapped up a wrist-slittingly depressing final season of "The Wire" and is still angsting its way through five nights a week of "In Treatment" (tonight's patient: Alex, the arrogant Navy pilot who insists his recent brush with death and a disastrous mission in Iraq have had no effect on him), announced yesterday it has ordered up 13 episodes of a new drama series, "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency," based on the international best-selling novels of Alexander McCall...

In its latest attempt to stem the decline in first-class mail, the U.S. Postal Service is collaborating with HBO to promote letter writing -- and a television miniseries about one of the most prolific letter writers in American history. This month and next, about 3 billion pieces of mail will bear a special postmark with a quotation from John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the second president of the United States, who famously exchanged more than 1,100 letters with his wife, Abigail.

Ryan Murphy's next TV series will be about human sexuality, and it'll run on HBO. The guy behind FX's plastic-surgery soap "Nip/Tuck," Fox's high-school musical dramedy "Glee," FX's anthology "American Horror Story" and NBC's gay-couple comedy "The New Normal" got a pilot order for "Open. " It's described as a "modern, provocative exploration of human sexuality and relationships" by the Web site Deadline, which got the exclusive on the news. Exploring human sexuality and relationships modernly and provocatively will be a married...

HIGHLIGHTS FINALE WATCH: No word yet on whether freshman mid-season drama "The Carrie Diaries" (CW at 8) will see a second season — although Sarah Jessica Parker has been openly dismissive of the series, a "Sex and the City" prequel about Carrie Bradshaw in her teen years. Anyway, in the finale, Carrie faces junior prom, which is filled with lots of drama when some secrets are revealed. FINALE WATCH: The American version of "Being Human" (Syfy at 9) wraps...

HIGHLIGHTS With a name like Steak Me Home Tonight, Dave's food truck was obviously going to get stolen at some point — and that's exactly what happens on "Happy Endings" (ABC at 8). Later, Alex convinces Penny to reach out to her estranged father (guest star Andy Richter) in time for her wedding. The CEO of Fatburger — a "fast casual" restaurant — goes on "Undercover Boss" (CBS at 8), and discovers some of his stores have payroll issues and broken equipment.

Vice is a brash, Brooklyn-based magazine and international media company, but mostly it's a brand of thinking and marketing that has extended itself over the past decade to a popular Web site and YouTube channel with bureaus around the world. Vice makes as much news as it reports; a recent foray involved the Vice crew bringing Dennis Rodman to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un. There's nothing Vice won't cover or turn into a stunt — culture, news, war, sex, music, drugs — and it seems to do just fine...

Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus lived a comfortable life in 1930s Philadelphia, where he made a good living as a lawyer, and she kept a stylish house. They were secular Jews who sent their children to a Quaker school, and unlikely candidates for the mission they assigned themselves. Gilbert revealed the plan to his wife as he was shaving in the bathroom, so their young son and daughter would not hear. He wanted to go to Vienna and save 50 Jewish children from the Nazis. In 1939, most of the world had not...

LOS ANGELES — Although the show's future wasn't much in doubt, fans of HBO's lavish fantasy series " Game of Thrones " can rest a little easier knowing that it will get another season. On Tuesday, two days after the show's third-season premiere, HBO announced a fourth season of "Game of Thrones. " The decision came after the announcement that the show had achieved an audience high of 6.7 million viewers across all three airings of the show Sunday. That topped the previous...

HBO keeps most of its online video content under lock and key. Other than snippets (and the occasional full episode) on its YouTube channel or HBO.com, most people that want to legally watch its shows on-the-go have one real option : pay for episodes on iTunes. But HBO can lower that pay wall at will?especially when it wants to promote something new?and that's what it's doing for its documentary series The Alzheimer's Project . It's even distributing the four-part series across Facebook and MySpace, and...

You're reading it here first: Sean Atkins , who was the SVP of Digital Media at HBO, is leaving the company, we have learned and confirmed. Atkins had been at HBO for only a year, and was previously the head of Development and Programming at Yahoo ( NSDQ: YHOO ). Atkins was based in Los Angeles for the company, and was in charge all of the digital media ops, including directing daily operations of new ventures within HBO. He was also responsible for HBO's latest investment in FunnyOrDie.

To do real justice to "Game of Thrones," I'd have to quit my job and tackle those 4,000 or so unread pages of George R.R. Martin's series of five fantasy novels on which the finely crafted HBO series is based. There just isn't that sort of time in my sort of world. "Game of Thrones," which begins its third season Sunday night, is like no other TV show around right now — brilliant, exasperating, enthralling, and, if you let it become so, hard work . It's rare that I want take-backs as...

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi has a special empathy for marginalized or forgotten Americans — and I don't just mean President George W. Bush, the subject of her breakout documentary. Her best work has ranged from a portrait of disgraced evangelical minister Ted Haggard to the daily lives of children whose families live in motels across from Disneyland. Thanks to a steady working relationship with HBO, she is able to crank out a project every year or so with an efficiency that must be...