Max Delivered the Final Blow to the Horny, Quirky Comedy

When history looks back on 2023 and the solidarity of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the first since 1960, it will probably be seen as the dawn of a new era, the entry of Artificial Intelligence into Entertainment. But when one era begins, another ends. This past year pretty firmly shut the door on what had been a Wild West era of streaming, where the desperation to fill the endless gaping maw of streaming content made for a period where the horniest, quirkiest ideas could thrive.

But no streaming service went all in more than Max, especially when it still had the HBO in front of it. During the short period before Warner Media merged with Discovery+, the streaming service probably debuted more offbeat series worth watching than the rest of the competition. The roster of shows that came and went with few people even noticing their existence included series like I Hate Suzie, Beforeigners, Trigonometry, Starstruck, and now Sort Of, the third and final season of which debuted all episodes on Thursday, January 18, 2024.

Still an underrated gem despite winning a Peabody, Sort Of is a delightful little coming-of-age comedy series from the Canadian duo of Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo. The series stars Baig as Sabi Mehboob, a non-binary first-generation Pakistani millennial working two dead-end service jobs to make ends meet while trying to figure out what to do with their life. Over the three-season arc, Sabi embraces their nonbinary identity and balances it against their parents' cultural expectations while finding themselves as an artist.

Sort Of is exactly the sort of show the president of GLAAD stood on stage and begged the room to make more of during the delayed 2023 Emmys. Yet, most people have no idea it existed, let alone that it ran three seasons, or that it is ending this month. Just like they probably never knew Trigonometry was out there figuring out throuplehood long before the Gossip Girl reboot brought the word into the mainstream. They probably also had no idea Billie Piper was on Max for two seasons in I Hate Suzie, doing some of her best work grappling with how middling celebrities in the Instagram age deal with unwanted photographs being uploaded to social media — versus the one she totally uploaded herself that may not have been that far off to begin with — and where the line of consent begins and ends, and what those who wish to be famous owe and don’t owe the public.

All of these series had one thing in common that separated them from other short-lived shows that at least got a fair shake in the marketing department like Our Flag Means Death, Minx, Rap Sh!t, or Julia — they were co-productions, done either with British channels, HBO Nordic, or the CBC in Canada. In each case, the U.S. marketing seemed to rely on the other team doing all the work, and the show being a big hit elsewhere, as if that would automatically make audiences here tune in. Spoiler alert: It did not. When a show did wind up being a big hit, like The Tourist, a co-production with the BBC, the BBC simply took its hit series to a streaming service that would actually promote the material. The Tourist Season 2 will now debut on Netflix on February 29, 2024.

However, for all that HBO Max and then Max failed to market these series — or one-shot limited series like It’s A Sin — dooming them all to the current ongoing mass cancellation, the really remarkable thing is that these series ever came to be in the first place. Certainly, none of these shows would have been greenlit prior to 2013, back when HBO still followed the traditional model of greenlighting pitches to be turned into pilot scripts, and then choosing a small handful of those scripts to be filmed, and then one or two of those filmed pilots to be made into shows.

Perhaps one might imagine a series like Julia, about how Julia Child fought to make it to air, getting the go-ahead, though not nearly in the sexually suggestive or fun form that it took. But Minx’s period piece workplace comedy about a feminist making a porn magazine for women would have been DOA, and no matter how successful Issa Rae’s Insecure was, her Rap Sh!t would have had a much tougher time getting made, let alone a second season. As for David Jenkins’ Our Flag Means Death, a show that felt like it was made directly for the AO3 crowd with every famous historical pirate falling somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, chances of that being pitched — even with Taika Waititi starring and executive producing — before this environment came into existence are nearly zero, let alone getting to run two seasons.

In a sense, we have Netflix to thank for accidentally knocking down all those layers of gatekeeping for the past few years. Though it behaves far more like a traditional studio today, Netflix came in as a tech start-up, with all the benefits of the venture capital model that allowed it to exist for years in seemingly bottomless debt, with no sign of turning a profit. In order to compete, studios felt like they, too, had to open their wallets infinitely wide, punting any regard for the balance sheet into some nebulous future.

They also quickly learned that streaming offerings cannot be static. It’s great for Disney to open its entire vault, but what’s on tap for next month? With Netflix regularly pumping out 40 to 60 original titles a month every month, it wasn’t just that the gatekeepers were shoved aside. The gates themselves were practically swept out to sea by the deluge of needed content.

But, like the idea that in the future every production studio would have its own successful vertically integrated streaming service filled and sustained only by the in-house IP it hoarded like a dragon sitting on gold, this was never going to work in practice. No one really wants to subscribe to 10 different streaming services, not even at $4.99 a month (and certainly not at $19.99 a month). Eventually, debts would have to be paid; eventually, profits would have to be turned.

Does that mean we have to lose all the progress that’s been made in the last decade? It hasn’t escaped notice that most of the shows getting canned are ones made by and centering marginalized groups — women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people — while shows and movies written by, for, and about white men continue unscathed. One certainly hopes that’s not going to be the case. But as the Great Rebundling rolls back the opportunities and the gatekeepers set themselves up with new rules that magically bring back old outcomes, it’s hard not to wonder what quirky weirdo shows we’re missing out on in the name of budget cuts, and what oddball pitches will never see the light of day because this era is over.

Ani Bundel is an entertainment writer covering everything from celebrities to movies to peak TV when she's not tweeting or Instagramming photos of her very fuzzy cats. Her other regular bylines can be found at PBS/WETA's Telly Visions, where she co-hosts a weekly podcast by anglophiles for anglophiles, CNN Opinions, and MSNBC Daily.