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There was a time before “It’s not TV, It’s HBO”. A time when HBO was a synonym for boxing matches, sports, and films with a lot of female nudity. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Home Box Office network was looking to boost its subscription numbers and did so by looking to entail the male audience with sports, violence, and sex.

Those erotic films showed the channel that there was a line to separate themselves from the other cable channels by doing their own scripted TV series. Where to begin? From the start of Hollywood, book adaptations have been one of their primary ways to make movies, as back then, books were the primordial IP, and literary detective adaptations have never stopped working. That’s why, in 1983, HBO started producing its own dramas, and their first try was with a literary detective.

HBO Already Had a Philip...

★★★☆☆ Long before Matt Damon and Jude Law drenched their golden locks in the sun of southern Italy in the late Anthony Minghella's superb The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), René Clément - who can be placed at the forefront of the French New Wave - tackled Patricia Highsmith's famous novel with the elegant Plein Soleil (1960). From the off, we're provided with little prologue and thrown into the heady delights of Rome, where best buddies Tom Ripley (the blue-eyed Alain Delon, for whom this was his breakthrough film before going on to work with Antonioni) and Phillip Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) gallivant around the city picking up floozies.

Before long, their friendship sours and Tom, spurned by Phillip's affections, grows envious of his friend's wealth. This culminates in a plot by Tom to kill and assume the identity of his affluent former amie. Whilst Clément was the first to adapt Highsmith's inaugural...