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HBO has carved out a unique position in the crowded European television marketplace among the many competing terrestrial, cable, and over-the-top streaming services. In a European Union fraught with political and economic divisions, where the dream of a pan-European identity is receding farther and farther into the distance, the values associated with the HBO brand-quality, flexibility, mobility, and cosmopolitanism forged across local affinitieshave conjured up what comes closest to a palatable and desirable European identification. There is a synergy between the European Union's cultural and economic policies, which have been visualized as a database of nimble, adaptable identifications among equally available national, regional, European, and global registers at once, and its media regulation directives, which favor borderless, increasingly Internet-based media services that are able to operate in a trans-European and global scope and offer an expansive catalog of viewing choices to the savvy, cosmopolitan European consumer. HBO is an exemplary match for this cultural, economic, and regulatory landscape. Its catalog of high-quality films and TV programs is available via cable and via streaming platforms, and its specialization in creating quality format adaptations and original television series combines a transnational aesthetic sensibility with themes and genres that resonate across countries but are delivered with local inflections.The HBO brand has given a viable representational form to a pan-European identity that has been criticized as idealized and exclusionary in the past few years. This is a complex phenomenon fraught with irony, where technology, production strategies, delivery platforms, and marketing as well as local histories, themes, narratives, genres, and aesthetics all play a role. I acknowledge this complexity when examining how the HBO brand has aligned itself with the elusive European brand, navigating across the various crises and divides that have afflicted the European Union in recent decades. I am particularly interested in HBO's work in bridging the political division between Eastern and Western Europe through establishing production companies and making original programs in countries

I argue that postcolonial discourses are essential to unearthing and revising the complicated dynamic of codependence between Western and Eastern European nationalisms, which is haunted by internalized and rarely acknowledged traces of imperialism on both sides. However, the spatial expansion of postcolonial discourse to Europe’s own backyard needs to be matched by an expansion of research methods and objects. Postcolonial studies’ traditional commitment to theory and to textual analysis of literature and art cinema is beneficially complemented by engaging with popular media, such as television. It is also crucial to critically analyze the contexts of production and dissemination in which certain aesthetic and theoretical models are formed, lest we risk simply reaffirming the patterns in which Eastern European cultural nationalisms have reproduced themselves, which have also functioned to contain and disavow racism and imperialism. I propose to integrate within the postcolonial sphere methods and approaches from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, which have produced a significant body of work on everyday socialist and postsocialist practices but have remained under the radar of elite national cultures. They have also stayed in fairly isolated disciplinary brackets and thus badly need postcolonial studies’ sophisticated theorizing of ideology and identity and its commitment to historiography. At the end, I outline three sample possibilities for such a geopolitically expanded, methodologically hybridized encounter: the postcolonial study of popular (post)socialist television; a postcolonial take on the European circulation of socialist film cultures; and contemporary reality television focused on the European underclass.

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This article looks at television’s so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive framework at the intersection of postsocialist memory and history studies. It zooms in on postsocialist nostalgia as a relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network. Televisual nostalgia also implicates Western Europe and makes explicit a Western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War. This longing, in turn, shores up Europe’s repressed imperial history. Television’s role at the pressure points of postsocialist institutional and economic policy, consumption and narrative concerns makes it an indispensable window into the intertwined workings of nostalgia and nationalism within a postcolonial Europe.