TV

The news they were trumpeting in press releases were the debut dates for two of Showtime's flagpole franchises -- Weeds and The Tudors. Weeds, the razor-sharp suburban satire about a widowed mom (Mary Louise Parker) who takes up drug dealing (but only the finest homegrown marijuana, nothing harder, no meth labs, no coked-out gunplay -- yet, anyway) comes back for its fourth season on Monday, June 16th. It will be paired in a "comedy block" with the network's new edgy comedy, Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

The Tudors, a period drama with modern sensibilities about the revolving-door love life of Henry VIII (played by dreamy lover-boy Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is back for its second season on Sunday March 30. This season follows Henry's secret marriage to Anne Boleyn, his declaration that his marriage to Katherine was invalid, leading the pope to call for his excommunication, and various and miscellaneous hijinx, and perhaps a beheading or two -- Anne does fail to provide the king with a male heir, after all. The buzz item here is that Peter O'Toole will be playing the Pope.

We start by talking about the Showtime brand, what it means, what it stands for.

"It's funny," says Mr. Blank. "Defining your brand, coming up with taglines and catch phrases, that's something you struggle with when you're not doing well. But we feel like we're really in a great place so we don't spend a whole lot of time trying to define what we do. We're just doing it."

Mr. Greenblatt, not surprisingly, concurs with his boss. "Back when I was with Fox, when the network was first starting, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell people what we were all about. But then we had these hit shows -- [Beverly Hills] 90210, In Living Colour, The Simpsons -- and we didn't have to try and figure it out anymore. The shows told the story of who and what Fox was.

"These shows self-identify," he continued. "They reflect the quality and push the edge in interesting ways, and that's what people are tuning into Showtime for."

I asked them about branding because they are programming and we are watching at a time when there is more and more on television and lines are less and less clear. Broadcast networks are pushing the boundaries of their programs to create a more cable-like sense of realism and sophistication. Basic cable networks are creating more and more premium-cable-like programming and premium cable networks are working to find ways to maintain their programming distinctions in ways beyond bad words and body parts.

"Everybody's encroaching on the premium category," acknowledges Mr. Greenblatt. "We've got to be about more than just shows with nudity and people saying f---. We think we're doing that in all sorts of ways, with the psychological tensions and complexities running through our shows, for instance. But the big thing for us is that to be on Showtime a show has to have some edge, some really, really provocative twist or element so that people are automatically moving to the edge of their seats when they tune in."

You only have to look at Showtime's roster to see this formula in action: There's Dexter, a show about an altruistic serial killer. And Weeds with its drug-dealing suburban mom. And now a show about a woman's secret life as a prostitute. Another show in the works is series being written by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody about a mother with multiple personality disorder and Tim Robbins is putting together a series about a dysfunctional family that runs a pharmaceutical company. "We're looking for juicy territory that we can dig into and have fun with," says Mr. Greenblatt.

With so much innovative original programming being created across the cable spectrum -- from AMC following up its brilliant early-60s period drama Mad Men with its take on the drug-dealing suburban archetype (in this case the schoolteacher dad) in Breaking Bad to FX's continuing explorations of beautiful surfaces and ugly cores in series like Nip/Tuck and Damages -- maybe the easiest way to organize all these network niches is to borrow categories from book publishing. Television is the new literature, after all. So if HBO -- with its emphasis on deeply detailed, character-driven storytelling -- is the network of novels, then Showtime is your pulp fiction platform.