Frank Rich: 'Fun' HBO Job Will Be Helped By His Reviewing Experience

By: Joe Strupp With a career that included 20 years of television, theater and film criticism, Frank Rich, The New York Times columnist, says his years of watching more bad productions than good will not lower his expectations for quality on the other production side of the business at HBO.

"There is always a certain amount of crap," he says. "We can't pretend everything that came before now is the golden age. There are always good things and bad things. This has actually been a very good theater season."

Rich, 58, says he would never want to be a critic again, but his love of theater and quality television and film made the HBO job, which he calls a freelance position, tempting. The part-time opportunity was announced this week, with word that Rich will continue his weekly New York Times Sunday column.

"I did it for 20 years, I never wanted to spend my entire career doing the same thing," he says. "I have always liked shaking things up; pop culture goes through cycles. There are golden ages and there are fallows."

And when it comes to entertainment, Rich claims the ups and downs are just as typical. "There is always going to be more junk than good stuff," he says of the television, film, and theater worlds. "That is just the way it is."

Rich's career as a television and film critic ran from 1973 to 1980 with stints at New Times magazine, the New York Post and Time magazine. From 1980 to 1993, he was The New York Times chief theater critic, jumping to the Op-Ed page in 1994.

A longtime friend of HBO co-president Richard Plepler, Rich said the two discussed a consultant role as far back as December, with the plan that Rich would help develop project ideas and programming. "To look for programs and projects that might be off their radar screen, that might make programming for them in the form of series, film or documentaries or any of the genre they do," he says. "To sort of bat things around in programming in general. It is not a full- time job."

Rich says just writing his weekly column takes up most of his time: "The column is incredibly time-consuming and labor intensive. This will be fun."

Rich says his love of pop culture is what drew him to the HBO gig more than the entertainment aspect. He says one of the interesting aspects is that television is undergoing such vast changes in technology. "What is going on in the newspaper business is also going on in the television business and the movie and film business," he declares. "It is chaos because people aren't even sure how to distribute television anymore."

As for HBO and the chances for success, he says: "they have their failures. I am sure I will have them, too."