If there could be said to have been a
Ghost Whisperer DVD Robert Greenblatt moment in his tenure at Showtime, perhaps it was the debut of one of his biggest successes, "
Ghost Whisperer DVD box set."
On paper, it didn't make much sense. Why cast the
Ghost Whisperer box set middle son from HBO's "Six Feet Under," which Greenblatt produced, as a dangerous but somehow likable serial killer other than the fact that Michael C. Hall had HBO
Ghost Whisperer DVD season?
And yet just minutes into the opening episode of "
Ghost Whisperer DVDs" in 2006, it was clear Hall was accomplishing a transition highly difficult to make on TV. He slipped so effortlessly out of the character for which he was known into such a different one that it was as if he was
Ghost Whisperer 1-5 DVD amnesia on the audience.
Hall made it work, and by extension so did
Prison Break DVD|
Prison Break, who would go on to do it again perhaps even more improbably with Edie Falco, who escaped the overhang of an even more iconic role on "
Prison Break DVD Set" to take on "Nurse Jackie."
And therein lies the genius behind the
Prison Break DVD Box Set but still distinguished Greenblatt era at Showtime: He may have recruited a lot of HBO players, but it took a playbook of his own creation to score with them all over again.
Greenblatt, who is expected to stand down after a
Prison Break DVDs tenure, may not have been cable original
Prison Break complete box sets biggest success story, but don't underestimate his feat: he summoned the sun into HBO's shadow. He transformed the dynamic of the HBO-Showtime competitive dyad, remaking the network's No. 2 status from the also-ran you
Prison Break DVD Season to the underdog for which you root.
To some degree, his success was less his doing than the
CSI New York DVD undoing of HBO. The waning years of the Chris Albrecht/Carolyn Strauss administration were ones where the network was flying so high its head got lodged in the clouds. Recall thumbsuckers like "
CSI New York DVD Season" and "John From Cincinnati" and it's tempting to conclude HBO was blinded by its own temporary Midas complex. It's as if the pay channel believed its subscribers would watch anything as
CSI New York DVD box set as they slapped the HBO brand on it.
But at the very same time HBO was losing its
CSI New York DVDs, Greenblatt was refining the formula for scripted originals. Premium cable has always worked by mixing the profane and the profound, but it's tricky to figure out the right ratio. He didn't hit home runs right
CSI New York box set; there was an awkward couple of years where "Huff" was passed off as the next big thing, but even that forgotten drama got Showtime on Emmy's radar.
No, it wasn't until "Weeds" hit the air in 2005 that
The Simpsons Box Set truly refined the formula. The drug-dealer comedy brought together the elements that he learned to bring together again and again: strong, brand-name lead (Mary Louise-Parker), inspired
The Simpsons dvd season (Jenji Kohan), an avoidance of typical TV formatting (half-hour comedy, but not a sitcom) and a premise that indulged Showtime's content liberties (drugs, drugs, drugs). "Weeds" seemed all the more revelatory because it arrived precisely when TV's comedy tank was running so low that
the simpsons dvd box set seemed no one would ever laugh at the medium again. Not an easy time to test the genre.
Greenblatt hasn't exactly avoided comparisons to
the simpsons dvd|
the simpsons by casting his shows with HBO castoffs like Hall, Falco and "Weeds'" Parker and Justin Kirk ("Angels in America"). But it's simplistic to say he was imitating HBO wholesale; the Showtime series that followed "Weeds" had a provocative charm that
the simpsons dvds with the pretensions that suffocated HBO for a while (but that's all over now in the post-"True Blood" era).
What's more about Greenblatt's Showtime
the simpsons seasons dvd was that they became a destination for talent that may not have been A-list, but to even get the B+-list is a feat on television, where actors primarily known for film once rarely slummed.
the simpsons complete dvd box set Rhys-Meyers ("The Tudors") and Toni Collette ("The United States of Tara"), soon to be followed by Laura Linney ("The Big C") and Jeremy Irons ("The Borgias") is really no small accomplishment, and one where they've beat HBO, which tends to mint stars rather than hire
the simpsons complete season.
