@Old Goat,
HBO (Home Box Office) is one of several networks started to serve the cable television market. The "Big Three" networks won't show titties, or use bad language, and HBO began producing both motion pictures and television series which showed titty (gasp!) and used bad language. With the silly restraints which hobble the old established networks removed, HBO has been able to produce quality entertainment.
That's not the only route, of course. The founder of the Cable News Network, Ted Turner, bought a television station in Atlanta, George in the 1970s. He did that from selling off several radio stations he had aquired. He then began showing a steady fare of old movies, old cartoons, and old situation comedies. It worked modestly well, and then in the late 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission allowed him to purchase a satellite, and begin broadcasting his "Super Station" to cable providers, who like it because its "white bread" fare wouldn't offend the general public. Getting in on cable television on the ground floor was a brilliant stroke.
The FCC requires broadcasters to broadcast at least fifteen minutes of news four times a day. That irritated Turner, who was forced to venture into territory in which he was not interested. The FCC fined him again and again, and threatened to shut him down. So, in 1980, he launched Cable News Network (CNN), saying: ""We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event... and when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' before we sign off." This was another brilliant stroke, and since it was all a part of Turner Entertainment, the FCC was mollified.
Later, he bought MGM/UA (Meto-Goldwyn-Mayer and United Artists), sold off the parts he didn't want, and acquired the film libraries of MGM, United Artists, RKO-Republic and a huge chunk of Warner Brothers, along with thousands of cartoons from the "golden era" of movie cartoons. With that, he was able to strengthen the range and quality of the still largely inoffensive programming he was selling through the "Super Station," now a staple of many cable television services.
He went from strength to strength, but the point is that cable television blew the television market wide open, and Home Box Office has brilliantly exploited it to produce high quality television series which appeal to adults who aren't opposed to dancing and nekkid titties, and this has spawned a legion of imitators.
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