Every Sunday evening, as The Final of Us airs on HBO, a way of dread permeates the air—and it has nothing to do with the truth that Joel and Ellie might by no means know peace. As an alternative, it’s the notion that The Final of Us, with its style roots and status TV gloss, seems like the ultimate salvo of a specific period of HBO Sunday evening programming. 

To make sure, HBO and its Finish-of-the-Weekend Bummer Salve lineup aren’t going wherever. The fourth season of Succession begins on March 26, only a couple weeks after The Final of Us ends. However on the identical time, it stands to be one of many final, if not the final, breakout present to premiere earlier than HBO Max—the streaming service the place most individuals watch the sequence—merges with content material from Discovery+, lumping it into an leisure ecosystem with My Lottery Dream Residence. The years of logging into HBO Go, and later HBO Max, for Recreation of Thrones, and later Home of the Dragon, are gone. 

Earlier this week, Selection revealed a profile of HBO content material chief Casey Bloys. When you’ve beloved any HBO present over the last decade, from Silicon Valley to The White Lotus, he had one thing to do with it. Now he’s on the forefront of constructing the new streaming service, combining HBO’s content material with Discovery’s. In one thing of a reversal, Warner Bros. Discovery sources instructed The Wall Road Journal earlier this month that Discovery+ will stay a stand-alone service, however Bloys can be engaged on the brand new uber-streamer that’ll convey a lot of the corporate’s content material onto one service. The Selection piece famous that whereas that platform stays unnamed, “Max” seems to be the front-runner, which Bloys is OK with, given the sorts of exhibits usually related to HBO.

“Particularly if we’re going to have much more actuality programming, life-style programming, how rather more do we would like the HBO model to tackle?” Bloys instructed the publication. “That’s a reliable concern.” The purpose going ahead, he stated, was to “protect and shield the HBO model.” 

It’s wild that a lot of an id has been ascribed to a cable community, however even Final of Us star Pedro Pascal talked about in his interview with WIRED that one of many causes he needed to do the present was that he had a dream to be “part of one thing that will be necessary to a community like HBO.” It’s laborious to elucidate, however when the brand new streaming service launches, theoretically this spring, it gained’t really feel the identical to see Barry subsequent to 90 Day Fiancé. Frankly, and I don’t imply this as an insult, nevertheless it’ll simply really feel like Netflix. 

Maybe, although, this nervousness additionally comes from the truth that a whole lot of what made HBO and HBO Max singular is already gone. Earlier this week, I spent a while with my colleagues on the Gadget Lab podcast speaking in regards to the state of streaming. On the present I discussed that HBO Max has already shelved one in every of my favourite exhibits, Mrs. Fletcher, successfully making it inconceivable to stream wherever proper now. The identical is true of many HBO exhibits, together with beloved sci-fi sequence like Westworld. 

A few of these exhibits might finally resurface on different free, ad-supported streaming networks, however that’s type of not the purpose. Since Warner Bros. and Discovery merged, the newly shaped operation has gone by means of a whole lot of adjustments—together with the canning of almost full films (Batgirl). On this surroundings, it’s simple to fret, and I’ve, that the expertise of watching HBO Max isn’t lengthy for this world. Possibly sooner or later I’ll have to elucidate it to younger individuals, the best way I’ve to elucidate that watching MTV used to imply watching hours of music movies. 

This preemptive nostalgia may be a bit overwrought, but when the recognition of The Final of Us has signaled something, it’s that amidst all of the turmoil of the streaming wars, watching HBO in any incarnation—Go, Max, on cable—has stayed fairly constant. However it might not final without end.