I should probably get this out of the way before the Stern faithful come after me: I am a huge Howard Stern fan.
I’ve listened for years. I know the voices. I know the staff. I know the grudges, the neuroses, the impressions, the arguments, the bits, and the endless stories about Howard’s life. I’m exactly the person HBO Max’s new version of The Howard Stern Show should be made for.
And I was bored.
That is a strange thing to say about Stern, because whatever else you can say about him, boring has rarely been the problem.
But the new HBO Max incarnation commits the one sin Stern has spent an entire career avoiding: it takes something that works beautifully in your imagination and makes it painfully literal.
The setup is simple. Stern now does a live SiriusXM show on Mondays, and an adapted version drops Thursdays on HBO Max. SiriusXM itself describes the streaming show as an adaptation of the radio program, with occasional extras.
And therein lies the problem.
It’s basically the radio show with pictures.
That sounds obvious, but it fundamentally changes the experience.
Radio has always required the listener to participate. When Howard starts talking about Gary, Ronnie, JD, Sal, or whatever piece of minutiae has consumed his morning, you build the room in your head. You imagine Gary reacting from the other side of the glass. You picture Ronnie getting worked up over his sex life. You create the studio’s rhythm yourself.
That invisible collaboration between broadcaster and listener is part of what made Stern’s show so addictive.
On HBO Max, there is nothing left to imagine.
Gary is just standing there. Nice goatee.
Robin is on a screen. Glad to see she looks healthy.
Cut to Fred creating a sound effect.
Someone else is sitting in another room.
The camera cuts.
That’s it.
A conversation that can somehow feel intimate, chaotic, and strangely cinematic in audio suddenly looks like exactly what it is: people sitting around talking.
And not every conversation benefits from being seen.
That distinction matters because Stern has successfully translated himself to television before.
The old E! show, which ran from 1994 to 2005, was also assembled from radio-show footage. But those half-hour episodes existed in a very different media environment and often functioned as an access point into a world viewers couldn’t otherwise see.
Cameras captured a famously unruly radio program that still felt dangerous, unpredictable, and slightly forbidden. Stern himself later called the E! run one of the greatest projects of his career.
There was voyeurism built into it.
You wanted to see what the hell was happening in that studio.
The HBO Max version arrives in 2026, when practically every piece of Stern content already has a visual component somewhere. Clips circulate constantly. The studio is familiar. The staff is familiar. Everyone has social media. No curtain is left to pull back.
So instead of revealing another dimension of the show, HBO Max often removes one.
And I’m not alone in wondering who this is actually for.
One longtime fan on Reddit asked that exact question, arguing that the HBO version feels heavily edited and loses the conversational quality that makes the radio show work. The same fan asked why existing SiriusXM listeners would watch material they have already heard, and whether newcomers would care enough about the staff to follow it without years of context.
That may be the central flaw.
For hardcore fans, it’s redundant.
For new viewers, it can be impenetrable.
That leaves an oddly narrow middle audience: people sufficiently interested in Howard Stern to watch 90 minutes of his show, but not interested enough to already listen to Howard Stern.
Good luck finding them.
Fan response has unsurprisingly been rough. Some viewers have described the HBO version as repetitive or difficult to sit through, while others have complained that it simply repackages material they already heard earlier in the week.
Still, I don’t think the problem is simply that “Howard isn’t what he used to be.”
That criticism has followed Stern for decades and is too easy.
People change. Stern changed. His audience changed. The culture changed.
There is still something fascinating about listening to Howard process the ordinary details of his existence. His gift has never simply been outrageousness. It’s his ability to obsess over something tiny until it somehow becomes compelling: a staff member’s vacation, someone’s relationship, a bad restaurant experience, an argument with Beth, a strange celebrity encounter.
Radio amplifies that skill because the listener fills in everything around him.
Television exposes the mundane reality underneath it.
Seeing the room doesn’t make the story richer. It sometimes makes you realize that absolutely nothing is happening.
There is also an editing problem.
Stern’s show works because it meanders. A discussion can wander into another discussion, trigger an old story, invite a staff member into the conversation, and eventually land somewhere nobody expected.
Compressing that into a streaming episode creates a weird contradiction.
The HBO Max show is too long to feel like a highlight reel and too edited to preserve the original’s looseness.
It sits somewhere in between.
And that may explain why the old E! comparison doesn’t quite hold up. E!’s version was largely a condensed curiosity – a visual greatest-hits package from something happening somewhere else. The HBO Max show feels as though it wants to be treated as a television program in its own right.
REELated:
‘Daredevil: Born Again’ will end with Season 3
But where is the television?
If this is going to exist on HBO Max, then give me something I cannot get from the microphone.
Follow Gary home.
Put Ronnie in the car.
Show us how the staff prepares a bit.
Give us documentary pieces, backstage material, rehearsals, arguments, production meetings, whatever weirdness happens before Howard switches on the mic.
Use the visual medium.
Howard’s earlier Channel 9 television show understood this instinct decades ago. That program mixed talk, sketches, field pieces, games, and other material specifically created for television.
That’s a TV show.
Watching Howard talk into a microphone from another angle isn’t.
And maybe that’s why this disappoints me more as a fan than it would if I didn’t care.
I still like hearing Howard.
I still want Robin there.
I still enjoy hearing Fred hit precisely the wrong sound effect at precisely the right moment.
I still care about Gary.
I’m still listening.
But radio asks me to meet Howard halfway.
The HBO Max show does all the imagining for me, and somehow gives me less.
For the self-proclaimed King of All Media, simply pointing cameras at radio feels surprisingly unimaginative.
And Howard Stern should never be boring.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
