Each Sunday night time, as The Last 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. Instead, it’s the notion that The Last of Us, with its style roots and status TV gloss, appears like the ultimate salvo of a specific period of HBO Sunday night time programming. 

To be certain, HBO and its End-of-the-Weekend Bummer Salve lineup aren’t going anyplace. The fourth season of Succession begins on March 26, only a couple weeks after The Last of Us ends. But 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 Home. The years of logging into HBO Go, and later HBO Max, for Game of Thrones, and later House of the Dragon, are gone. 

Earlier this week, Variety published a profile of HBO content material chief Casey Bloys. If 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 told The Wall Street 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 Variety 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.

“Especially if we’re going to have a lot more reality programming, lifestyle programming, how much more do we want the HBO brand to take on?” Bloys informed the publication. “That’s a legitimate concern.” The objective going ahead, he mentioned, was to “preserve and protect the HBO brand.” 

It’s wild that a lot of an id has been ascribed to a cable community, however even Last of Us star Pedro Pascal talked about in his interview with WIRED that one of many causes he wished to do the present was that he had a dream to be “a part of something that would be important to a network like HBO.” It’s arduous to elucidate, however when the brand new streaming service launches, theoretically this spring, it received’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. 

Perhaps, although, this nervousness additionally comes from the truth that a variety 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 unattainable to stream anyplace proper now. The identical is true of many HBO exhibits, together with beloved sci-fi sequence like Westworld. 

Some of those exhibits might ultimately resurface on different free, ad-supported streaming networks, however that’s type of not the purpose. Since Warner Bros. and Discovery merged, the newly fashioned operation has gone via a variety of modifications—together with the canning of practically full films (Batgirl). In this setting, it’s straightforward to fret, and I have, that the expertise of watching HBO Max isn’t lengthy for this world. Maybe sooner or later I’ll have to elucidate it to younger folks, the best way I’ve to elucidate that watching MTV used to imply watching hours of music movies. 

This preemptive nostalgia could be a bit overwrought, but when the recognition of The Last 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. But it might not final ceaselessly.