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Apple Deal Returns Former HBO Boss Richard Plepler to Spotlight

Ten months after he chafed under AT&T’s takeover of the network, he reboots himself as a producer in a five-year deal with Apple TV Plus.

In an interview, Richard Plepler said repeatedly that he wanted to be a producer, not an executive.Credit...Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times

In the 10 months since Richard Plepler stepped down as HBO’s chief executive, the final season of “Game of Thrones” came and went, CBS and Viacom merged, and Disney and Apple rolled out new streaming services.

The entertainment world is in flux, and to start the new year, Mr. Plepler is making changes of his own. The gregarious executive, a quintessential New York power player who spent 27 years at HBO and left eight months after AT&T became its owner, is rebooting himself as a producer. And he will do it with Apple.

In a recently signed five-year deal, Mr. Plepler’s new company, Eden Productions, will make television series, documentaries and feature films exclusively for Apple TV Plus, the streaming platform that started in November. The arrangement gives Mr. Plepler a significant role in an expanding streaming universe soon to include HBO Max, a supersize platform that has been a focus of his former corporate home since he departed in February after having lost some of his autonomy.

“It was instantaneously clear to me that I had a wonderful and very privileged run at HBO and I wasn’t going to be able to duplicate that again,” Mr. Plepler said in his first interview since leaving the network. “And I didn’t want to try to duplicate that again. It felt very clear to me that I just wanted to do my own thing.”

Mr. Plepler, 61, was a key figure in helping make HBO into an original-programming powerhouse. In the years he was in charge, the network won more than 160 Emmys, including for series like “Game of Thrones,” “Big Little Lies” and “Veep.”

Apple is hopeful he still has the magic touch, this time as a producer. The company has not yet disclosed the number of Apple TV Plus subscribers or how many people have watched its series. Reviews for its first slate of shows have been mixed, even for its big-budget flagship program, “The Morning Show,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, which landed three Golden Globe nominations, including for best drama.

At Apple, Mr. Plepler has had a longtime admirer in Eddy Cue, the company’s senior vice president of internet software and services. Mr. Cue is the executive who hired Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht from Sony’s television studio to run Apple’s entertainment division.

Mr. Cue and Mr. Plepler worked closely together when Apple and HBO collaborated on the streaming service HBO Now in 2015. And the mix of Apple TV Plus programming reflects HBO’s boutique approach, rather than the all-things-to-all-viewers strategy favored by Netflix.

Mr. Plepler said that he had conversations with several people about his next step, but that his only “serious” talks were with Apple. “I thought that Apple was the right idea very quickly, just because it was embryonic enough that I thought maybe, you know, I could make a little contribution there,” he said.

A New Yorker through and through, Mr. Plepler intends to provide series and movies for the Cupertino, Calif., company from the second floor of a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which he has been using as his office since August. On a mirror is a taped sign of a Ted Williams quote that he has carted to nearly every office he has inhabited in his long career: “Don’t ever let anyone monkey with your swing.”

Mr. Cue contacted Mr. Plepler soon after his abrupt departure from HBO.

“As you can imagine, in the days and the first couple weeks after I left, I received an enormous amount of well-wishing calls, and Eddy was among those people,” Mr. Plepler said. “He was generous enough to say on that call, ‘Look, when you settle down and you think about whatever it is you want to do, know that we’re all here and we’ll talk.’”

In July, Mr. Plepler had a meeting scheduled with Mr. Cue at the Allen & Company Sun Valley conference, an annual gathering of media and technology executives. He planned to broach the idea of producing for Apple, but only if Mr. Van Amburg and Mr. Erlicht were on board.

The week before the Sun Valley trip, Mr. Plepler had lunch with the two Apple TV Plus executives at the Mark Restaurant, an Upper East Side power-lunch spot at the Mark Hotel run by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

“If they weren’t responsive,” Mr. Plepler said of Mr. Van Amburg and Mr. Erlicht, “I didn’t want to pursue the conversation. And they could not have been both more generous and more enthusiastic. So that was my first conversation. And I followed that up with Eddy in Sun Valley, and we started putting this together.”

Mr. Van Amburg said he and Mr. Erlicht welcomed the addition of Mr. Plepler to Apple TV Plus.

“Jamie and I ran a studio for years, and we know how exciting it is to produce and start businesses,” he said. “We have a longstanding mutual admiration with Richard, and we’re looking forward to helping him build a dynamic production company and seeing him thrive with us at Apple.”

One topic Mr. Plepler did not want to discuss in detail: his exit from HBO.

“New people came in and bought the company,” he said. “And it was just the right time for me to go on to the next chapter in my life.”

When AT&T made its bid for HBO’s former corporate parent, Time Warner, in 2016, Mr. Plepler told The New York Times that there needed to be a “Chinese wall” between the premium cable network and the rest of the company. That did not happen.

John Stankey, the veteran AT&T executive who was appointed to oversee the collection of properties now called Warner Media, has made it a mission to knock down the silos between HBO, TNT, TBS and the Warner Bros. film studio.

The executive now in charge of Warner Media’s entertainment offerings, Robert Greenblatt, suggested in a December interview with The Hollywood Reporter that HBO cannot afford to stand aloof from the rest of the company, now that streaming has upended the industry. HBO Max, Mr. Greenblatt said, can become a formidable digital player only if it makes room for a broader array of content. HBO Max, which will debut in May with 10,000 hours of programming, is set to include fare that would not have been a fit for the old HBO, shows like the mainstream sitcoms “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory.”

“Look, the dirty little secret is that HBO has hit a ceiling,” Mr. Greenblatt said in the interview. “It can’t grow. In a world where there’s Netflix and Amazon, the only way to grow, I guarantee you, is to bundle it with something else that’s going to lift it.”

When asked about Mr. Greenblatt’s remarks, Mr. Plepler said, “I can’t get into that.”

And when asked if he had signed an agreement that prevented him from discussing his departure from HBO, he declined to comment. Nor would he entertain the idea that Apple and HBO are now rivals — although they very much are.

“There is plenty of room out there for everybody to do well and for everybody to produce their version of good content, and I don’t think of it for two minutes as rivaling HBO,” he said. “I don’t think of it that way objectively, and I don’t think of it that way emotionally.”

Mr. Plepler has set himself apart from other entertainment-industry heavyweights by hobnobbing with politicians and writers, including Christopher Dodd, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Fran Lebowitz, Shimon Peres and David Remnick. In September, he co-hosted a book party for the Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss and a dinner at his home for the Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker. With the Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones, he also hosted a book party for the former Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a board member.

Although Mr. Plepler is known as an executive, he said repeatedly that he wanted to stick to producing. Invoking the small vessels that torpedoed enemy craft during World War II, he said: “All I want to do, and I mean this at the bottom of my heart, is run my own little PT boat. If I am successful at it as I hope I can be over the coming years, it will be more than enough work for me.

“But I do not want to run anything again,” he continued. “I’ve done that.”

John Koblin covers the television industry. He reports on the companies and personalities behind the scripted TV boom, and the networks that broadcast the news. He previously covered fashion. More about John Koblin

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: After HBO, A Fresh Start With Apple. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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