“The White Lotus” creator Mike White’s idea for Season 3 of the hit show has already gone done well with HBO bosses, confirmed Casey Bloys at Series Mania.
The executive revealed at French drama festival Series Mania on Thursday that White has “just pitched us the idea and it’s great. It’s a really fun idea and he’s shown it’s possible.”
Speaking to entertainment journalist Edith Bowman, Bloys added that White is “casting people you know” in the show — an obvious nod to now Golden Globe-winning actor Jennifer Coolidge — but writing their characters in a way that “allows you to rediscover them or see them in a new light.”
The HBO exec also noted that he “would have taken more” seasons of “Succession” but respected showrunner Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end the hit drama with Season 4.
“I would have taken more, but generally speaking, that is the kind of thing you want to leave to a creator,” said Bloys. “When a show is doing well, in this case, Jesse felt it was the right ending. He knew there is an open door, and if he felt it, he could have done more. But that’s an ideal situation that he’s choosing to end on his terms when he wants, telling the story he wants. But if he said, ‘I’ve got two more seasons,’ I would have said, ‘Okay, good.’”
In the half-hour keynote conversation, Bloys also discussed HBO’s international ambitions. Interestingly, he noted that the pre-Discovery merger era did not see a great deal of communication between the domestic and international HBO brands. This is already changing under Warner Bros. Discovery, said Bloys.
“Discovery has a huge international operation so bringing them together — one of the things that we wanted to do as a company that we never did at HBO and what we’re trying to do now that we’re combined [is]…At HBO, the domestic and the international operation didn’t have a lot of contact regarding programming. So Gerhard and I and our teams are trying to be very coordinated and look at the programming investment around the globe as one team.
“Where are we putting our bets, and in what shows? You come out with a better result that way. And obviously the best case scenario is something like ‘Squid Game,’ where something produced as a local original, and only as a local original to service the local market it’s in, if something like that can break out, it’s great.”
More to come.