Hey there, it’s your old friend AT&T. As you know, we’ve been in the telephone game for a long time. Maybe you’ve heard of our founder, Alexander Graham Bell? Yeah, we thought so. We were so amazing at one point the government was like, hey, you’re too amazing and it’s stopping others from being amazing, so we have to break you up. That’s how good at phones we were.
Then one day, we thought, you know what’s a natural extension of phone service? Satellite television. Ooh, ooh, and you know what would go well with that? A premium cable channel that gave the world Entourage. But it turns out, we are not good at the entertainment business.
Like seriously, we don’t know anything about the entertainment business.
First, we paid billions for DirecTV, which we’d like to point out is also a service, so we thought it wasn’t too much of a stretch. It’s just a different one where people can hang an ugly satellite in their front yards and watch a television package they can’t wait to stop paying for. To be honest, we thought that since they used satellites, and we were already using satellites, we could make a mega satellite for all of it. Turns out it didn’t really matter, but hey, a bunch of us couldn’t be talked out of a mega satellite.
Then we figured we should buy Time Warner. They owned HBO! People were always saying how they liked The Sopranos and Game of Thrones and Fraggle Rock, so how could we resist? Plus, in case you didn’t notice, it’s also a service. Seemed like a no-brainer. We could have beamed it all down from the mega satellite!
Turns out our shareholders weren’t happy with us racking up so much debt on these purchases. Don’t people have student loans? It’s the same thing! Don’t people have mortgages? It’s the same thing! Don’t people spend $150 billion on companies that don’t fit the business model they’ve had for a century? It’s the same thing!
We had a plan, though. We thought we could use HBO to cross-sell our phone services to people who liked shows about mobsters, dragons, and underground Muppets. We pitched a bunch of utility-themed shows that for some reason the network balked at. Tell us you wouldn’t watch any of these shows on a Sunday night:
- I Just Called to Say We Have Your Daughter: An FBI agent gets a call on his AT&T work phone from the terror cell he’s investigating, saying they’ve kidnapped his family. They won’t let anyone go until he plants a bomb at the Pentagon and pays for their family plan.
- Wires Crossed: A woman gets a call on her AT&T mobile phone from her fiancé, saying he’s dumping her because she didn’t upgrade her phone. He’s also a wizard who Freaky Fridays her with her outdated handset! Now she has to navigate her new job at a fancy AT&T store while finding another man to break the curse. Spoiler alert: she also has to marry him in four days.
- Dead Battery: The nephew of a recently deceased man must stay the night in a haunted mansion to earn his inheritance. In the final scene of the first season’s finale, he has to switch to DirecTV on his AT&T landline phone while being chased by ghosts.
We kept calling our coworkers at HBO about these dynamite ideas but for some reason they went unanswered (we thought maybe they had T-Mobile, but no).
So now that we’ve sold DirecTV for a huge loss and are spinning off WarnerMedia so it can go make babies with Discovery, we should finally be able to concentrate on our core business model. But that’s not what we’re going to do. Instead, we’re excited to announce our newest venture: creating fifty-foot robot hamsters and letting them loose for no reason. We think it has real potential.