Lunch with the FT: Richard Plepler

The last time I walked to the Lambs Club restaurant in Manhattan, I passed two women in Times Square who had just had their naked torsos painted by a street artist in full view of gawping police officers.

There is no clothes-free parading today, the chilly winter wind is an obvious impediment, but the restaurant is busier than I recall. "Usually it's a little quieter in here, which is one of the things I like about this place," says Richard Plepler, when I arrive at the corner booth where he is sitting at the back of the restaurant.

The Lambs Club, popular among members of the New York media scene, is a fitting location for our lunch - there are few who wield as much clout in that world as Plepler.

The 56-year-old is chief executive of HBO, the premium cable network that has, over the past 15 years, been responsible for some of the most innovative, talked-about shows on television, from the New Jersey mobsters of The Sopranos to the brutal dissection of urban life in The Wire, from the swords and dragons of Game of Thrones to True Detective's emotionally damaged cops. Its programmes have 15 nominations in Sunday's Golden Globes in Beverly Hills - the 14th successive year that it has garnered more nominations than any other television network.

It is HBO's programme roster that most people think of when they call to mind examples of today's "golden age of television". But, despite the awards and 130m subscribers round the world, Plepler faces plenty of challenges. In recent years, HBO's rivals have upped their game: shows such as House of Cards, Mad Men and Breaking Bad would be a natural fit for the channel but are shown elsewhere, while digital giants Netflix and Amazon have joined HBO's cable and satellite rivals, such as Showtime, Starz, FX and AMC, in bidding for the best scripts and shows.

This is Plepler's regular table, it turns out, sitting below portraits of Paul Newman and Orson Welles, with the day's newspapers, which he has brought along, spread out on the table in front of him. "I'm a political junkie and obsessed with news," he says. He sports a dark jacket, V-neck sweater and white shirt and, most strikingly for Manhattan in winter, the deep suntan that he apparently maintains year round. In a room of pasty New Yorkers, he is easy to spot.

As we settle in, he enthuses about HBO's latest project. Set in the New York music scene of the 1970s, the series has the working title Rock 'n' Roll and reunites Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter, who worked together on HBO's prohibition-era crime drama Boardwalk Empire. Mick Jagger is among the producers. "We had the delight a couple of weeks ago of sitting in Martin's library and watching the first cut of the pilot," Plepler recounts. "No surprise, master that he is, he hit it out of the park."

Plepler has been at HBO for more than two decades and was appointed chief executive two years ago. How, I ask, does he think the company sustains its creative streak? Of course, alongside the hits, HBO has also had shows that didn't work - the Dustin Hoffman-starring Luck (2012) fizzled out quickly, for example - and it initially struggled to fill the gap left by The Sopranos when the long-running series came to an end seven years ago. But its current roster includes Girls, Lena Dunham's frank twenty-something comedy, Silicon Valley, Mike Judge's satire about life in the tech bubble, and Veep, Armando Iannucci's Washington comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

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"Arthur Miller had a great line," he continues. "Artists do what they do. 'The rest is up to the Zeitgeist.' I think there's a lot of truth to that."

He mentions recent moves to beef up the network's current affairs programming: in 2013 HBO added Vice, a news magazine show from world hotspots produced by the youth-focused media company of the same name; recently it hired the British comedian John Oliver, who had impressed as a stand-in for the popular Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, to host his own late-night talk show, Last Week Tonight. When Oliver did a segment criticising plans to impose a new regulatory framework on the internet, the volume of people contacting the regulator to complain crashed its website. "The key was to let someone of his talent be unfettered in his ability to express himself," says Plepler. "What we did was give him the canvas."

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I wonder how a company that depends on creativity can encourage something that is apparently so nebulous. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," begins Plepler, faintly reminding me of Gordon Gekko's famous "lunch is for wimps" line.

"The work environment that we create has to be transparent and you have to be able to brook dissent," he continues. "Everyone can say what's on their mind and once we make a choice, everyone is behind it. Someone once said to me, 'You made the room safe to talk.' And I said, 'If you want to win, what other way is there to be?' "

. . .

Our waiter arrives and Plepler greets him by name. He tells Ray that he won't have a starter and chooses chicken paillard; I go for the steak tartare and a side order of french fries. "No soup?" Ray asks Plepler, hopefully. "Some wine?" I add, slightly more hopefully. Plepler demurs on both counts. "Ray will tell you that my only libation is the bottled water," he says.

Talk returns to business. Last summer Time Warner, HBO's parent company, was the subject of an unsolicited $71bn takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox. The word at the time was that the assets Murdoch most prized were its collection of sports rights and HBO. "I'm a great admirer of Rupert and always have been," says Plepler, diplomatically. "We simply wanted to sail under our own flag."

The Fox offer was a premium to Time Warner's then-share price but Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's chief executive, vowed that he and his team could get the company's price to the bid level with their own initiatives. When Time Warner shares reached the Fox bid price in November it was vindication of Bewkes' boast, with HBO playing a key part. For in October Plepler said the company would launch an "over the top" (OTT) service to consumers, which would deliver HBO digitally rather than via cable or satellite television. Time Warner shares rose after the announcement.

Plepler's OTT plan had raised the prospect of a great "unbundling" of cable and satellite TV: by taking its channel direct to consumers over the internet, it challenged the established model that has ruled TV for decades. In the US and Europe, cable and satellite viewers often have to pay a hefty price for a monthly subscription that includes hundreds of channels they don't want or watch. Fed-up with these high prices, many potential viewers, particularly the "millennial" generation, or those aged between 18 and 30, are shunning cable and satellite altogether.

In future HBO will be bundled with broadband subscriptions and will likely be substantially cheaper than a package that includes dozens of other channels. It's all about convenience, he says. "We want to make HBO available how [viewers] want it, when they want it and where they want it."

He is at pains to stress he that it is not abandoning the cable and satellite model - or companies that license HBO's programming, such as Sky in the UK. Indeed, he says, with better and more targeted marketing HBO should be able to gain subscribers that watch over cable and satellite. "You have millions and millions of [potential customers] out there when they fully understand the range and value of this brand."

I tuck into my steak tartare. The fries, in a little pot, are crunchy and delicious. Plepler cuts a piece of chicken and tells me that HBO is "thinking about new digital partners" and has to reach those potential customers "through all means at our disposal". What, I ask, does he mean by "new digital partners"? Are technology giants such as Google and Facebook going to carry HBO?

A former PR man - he initially joined HBO as a specialist in corporate communications - Plepler knows how to parry a question. But he doesn't exactly rule out my suggestion. "As you might imagine we have no shortage of inquiries from potential new partners," he says, choosing his words cautiously. "And we're thinking through very carefully about how we're going to do that." He reaches for my pot. "I'm stealing some of your fries here."

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Plotting the future of television is a far cry from Plepler's early career as a senator's aide in Washington. He got the political bug from his father ("my hero"), he says - a trial lawyer and a delegate for Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 Democratic convention who encouraged conversations about pressing matters of the day round the family dinner table in Connecticut.

After studying government in Pennsylvania, Plepler moved to Washington in 1981, where he landed a job as an aide to a Connecticut senator, Christopher Dodd. On his first day working for Dodd, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq. An ambitious young Plepler thought his ideas would be of interest to Dodd. "I went to see him and waited outside his door for the whole day so I could give him my solutions to the crisis." He laughs uproariously. "And he finally, sweetly, saw me at the end of the day and said, 'Young man, can I help you?' He didn't even know my name. "I said, 'Senator, I have the solution for the Middle East.' And [Dodd] chuckled heartily and said, 'We'll get to that tomorrow.' "

Later, Dodd would invite Plepler, a keen tennis player, to partner him on court against the likes of Edward Kennedy and James Baker, the former secretary of state. "We'd play and then we'd have lunch or dinner and I would find myself in the middle of a conversation about Latin America or Soviet policy," he recalls.

A strong supporter of Barack Obama, Plepler regularly hosts dinners bringing together figures from politics and entertainment at his home in Connecticut. They are often eclectic gatherings - a dinner for the former Israeli president Shimon Peres also included Sarah Jessica Parker and Jerry Seinfeld. < >

Ray has returned to take our dessert order. Plepler requests a scoop of coconut sorbet and an espresso, and so I copy him. With his dinner parties in mind, I ask if he sees himself as a connector of people from different fields. He parries again. "To be honest with you, it's much more in the service of my own curiosity and passions than anything."

The coconut sorbet arrives promptly, accompanied by a plate of dark chocolate pieces that goes down rather well. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine and a friend of Plepler's, has also been eating at the restaurant and appears at our table briefly to say hello. When he leaves, I steer Plepler back to politics.

He believes history will judge Obama as a much more successful president than his poll numbers suggest. "Think about what he inherited," he says. But, though there are plenty of liberal voices on HBO, John Oliver and Bill Maher among them, he denies that the network is informed or directed by a particular political perspective. "We're not putting Citizenfour [a Laura Poitras documentary about Edward Snowden] on because it has a particular political point of view. We're putting it on because it's a thoughtful and engaging piece of programming that is going to engender a lot of conversations."

We're almost out of time so I ask Ray for the bill. I wonder what the future holds for Plepler: he is close to Bewkes and would be one of the candidates to replace him as Time Warner chief executive if Bewkes ever decided to step down. Would he fancy the job? He sidesteps deftly. Running HBO is the "job of a lifetime," he says. "It occupies all my waking hours and, I confess, some of my sleeping hours as well." He laughs. Bewkes will not be around for ever, I say. "He is a young and dynamic 62 and I don't think he has any plans - nor should he - to stop working. I think he's at the peak of his powers."

The bill arrives and Plepler tells me he is an avid runner - he says he runs the Manhattan streets every night, in all weathers, much to the amusement of his friends who spot him from cars. "I think best on my run. I vent to no one in particular, so no one else has to hear it. "

Though I struggle to picture this polished media player shouting to himself while running in the New York snow, Plepler says the therapeutic benefits make it all worthwhile. "It's really liberating," he says as he heads back to work.

Matthew Garrahan is the FT's global media editor

Illustration by James Ferguson

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