HBO's Three Billion-Dollar Mistakes

In the late 2000s, HBO was the undisputed king of prestige television. The Sopranos had just wrapped up its legendary run, cementing HBO's reputation for groundbreaking drama. But even champions make mistakes—and HBO made three spectacular ones in rapid succession, passing on shows that would define the next decade of television.

The Walking Dead: Too Violent for HBO?

When producer Gale Anne Hurd shopped The Walking Dead to networks in 2009, both HBO and NBC expressed interest. There was just one catch: they wanted her to significantly tone down the graphic violence and gore from Robert Kirkman's comics.

Hurd's response? "No, thank you."

She refused to compromise Kirkman's vision, taking the show to AMC instead. The irony is almost painful: less than a year after The Walking Dead premiered on AMC in 2010, HBO launched Game of Thrones—a series that arguably featured more shocking violence. HBO had been worried about zombies getting too gory while sitting on scripts about the Red Wedding.

Breaking Bad: The Worst Meeting Ever

Vince Gilligan's experience with HBO was even more brutal, though in a different way. He later described his pitch meeting as "the worst meeting I ever had."

"The woman we're pitching to could not have been less interested," Gilligan recalled, "not even in my story, but about whether I actually lived or died." After the disastrous meeting, his agents couldn't even get the HBO executive on the phone to deliver an official rejection.

AMC picked up the show in 2008, six months after Mad Men premiered. The rest is Emmy history.

Mad Men: The One That Got Away

This one stung the most. Sopranos creator David Chase was such a fan of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men pilot script that he hired Weiner as a writer and personally passed the script to HBO executives.

HBO made an offer—but with strings attached. They'd produce the series only if Chase agreed to be an executive producer and direct the pilot. Chase, exhausted from The Sopranos and wanting to move away from weekly television, declined both conditions. HBO walked away.

HBO CEO Richard Plepler later called passing on Mad Men "the biggest regret of my professional career." The show went to AMC, premiered in July 2007, and won 16 Emmys over seven seasons.

AMC's Golden Age

Before 2007, AMC was known for airing classic movies, not creating them. These three HBO rejections transformed the network into a powerhouse:

• Mad Men (2007): 16 Emmys, defined the era's aesthetic
• Breaking Bad (2008): Considered one of the greatest series ever made
• The Walking Dead (2010): Became the biggest cable show of the 2010s

Together, they completed the shift in creative power from broadcast to cable that HBO had started with The Sopranos. The difference? AMC was willing to take risks that even HBO found too daring.

Sometimes the biggest gambles aren't the shows you greenlight—they're the ones you let walk out the door.