If you have a HBO subscription and haven’t dug into the network’s archive to watch their dusty ole adult programming like Taxicab Confessions and Real Sex, you might never get to, because all of it is gone.
The Los Angeles Times reports that earlier this summer, HBO quietly removed its soft-core adult movies and TV shows from its channels and subscription streaming services. HBO was acquired by A&T in June, but the real reason the network deleted the programs wasn’t because of a new owner; it’s because nobody was watching the porn anymore!
“Over the past several years HBO has been winding down its late-night adult fare,” an HBO representative told the LA Times. “While we’re greatly ramping up our other original program offerings, there hasn’t been a strong demand for this kind of adult programming, perhaps because it’s easily available elsewhere.”
Indeed it is. In fact, I wish we could go back to a time in which porn was broadcast on TV during a set time, because while I have nothing against porn, frankly it’s everywhere. There’s porn on Twitter. There’s porn in your inbox. There’s porn on Tumblr. There’s porn every time I want to illegally download a .zip file of an album I can’t buy on iTunes and I can’t figure out which button to press because there’s always, like, five buttons that say “DOWNLOAD” and I definitely download a virus in the process that infects my computer with more porn.
It’s also charming to imagine a time when something like Taxicab Confessions was raunchy, considering the new standard for porn is attaching the faces of celebs and everyday citizens onto porn star bodies to make “deepfakes.” *Shudder*
RIP, innocent HBO soft-core.