HBO Trivia
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49 free HBO trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
HBO started on November 8, 1972, with a hockey game beamed to 365 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Half a century later it is shorthand for prestige television. This quiz covers both halves of that story: the network itself, from Charles Dolan's 'Green Channel' proposal, the first satellite broadcast and the 'HBO in Space' intro to Sunday nights and the end of HBO Boxing, and the shows that built its reputation. Expect questions on Oz, The Larry Sanders Show, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Band of Brothers, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Game of Thrones, Veep, Chernobyl, Succession, The White Lotus, The Last of Us, House of the Dragon and more, plus a few on Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street for the family side. Difficulty runs from easy questions any subscriber will get to details for people who've read the whole history. Every answer was checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the letters HBO stand for?
Home Box Office
HBO stands for Home Box Office, a name chosen to suggest a box-office ticket to first-run movies and live events you could watch at home.
Q 02What was HBO's very first broadcast?
An NHL game between the Rangers and Canucks
An NHL game between the Rangers and Canucks opened HBO's first night because its Manhattan cable parent already held rights to Madison Square Garden events; a Paul Newman film followed.
Q 03Roughly how many subscribers received HBO's first-night broadcast?
365
365 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, saw the first night; HBO had meant to start in Allentown, but that city sat inside the Philadelphia 76ers' TV blackout zone.
Q 04HBO founder Charles Dolan sketched his pay-TV idea in 1971 during a family holiday aboard which ocean liner?
Queen Elizabeth 2
Queen Elizabeth 2 was carrying Dolan's family to France when he drafted a pay channel of uncut films and live sport to rescue his loss-making Manhattan cable company; he later founded Cablevision.
Q 05Which actor won three Emmys playing New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano?
James Gandolfini
James Gandolfini was invited to audition after a casting director saw a short clip of his performance in the 1993 film True Romance, and he played Tony for all six seasons.
Q 06Which 1975 boxing match was the first HBO program broadcast via satellite?
The Thrilla in Manila
The Thrilla in Manila came live from the Philippines by satellite, the step that turned HBO from a regional service fed by microwave towers into a network any American cable system could carry.
Q 07Which sister channel did HBO launch in 1980 as a movie-focused companion service?
Cinemax
Cinemax was launched as a direct competitor to The Movie Channel, giving HBO's owner a second, all-film service to sell alongside the original.
Q 08Which company owned HBO in 2024?
Warner Bros. Discovery
Warner Bros. Discovery owned HBO in 2024: it was created in April 2022 when AT&T spun off its WarnerMedia arm, bought only four years earlier, to merge with Discovery.
Q 09On which night of the week did HBO air new episodes of The Sopranos?
Sunday
Sunday night was The Sopranos' home for its whole run, down to the June 2007 finale, whose abrupt cut to black made many viewers think their cable had gone out.
Q 10Which comedian headlined 14 HBO stand-up specials between 1977 and 2008?
George Carlin
George Carlin made 14 HBO specials; the first, in 1977, opened with a warning about its language, and the last aired live less than four months before he died in 2008.
Q 11Whose 1992 Bucharest concert set the record for HBO's highest-rated special?
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson's Bucharest show from the Dangerous tour drew a 21.4 rating on HBO in October 1992, a record for the channel, after he sold the film rights for a reported $20 million.
Q 12Which sports show, launched in 1977, ran 31 seasons on HBO before moving to Showtime?
Inside the NFL
Inside the NFL was dropped in 2008 because, HBO said, the field of football shows had grown too crowded; host Bob Costas called the decision 'boneheaded'.
Q 13George Foreman's 1973 knockout of which unbeaten champion was the first fight HBO ever televised?
Joe Frazier
Q 21The Wire set each of its five seasons around a different institution in which city?
Baltimore
Baltimore was David Simon's home turf as a Sun reporter; the five seasons took on the drug trade, the port, city hall, the schools and the newspaper in turn.
Q 22Sex and the City was based on a newspaper column and book by which writer?
Candace Bushnell
Candace Bushnell based her New York Observer column on her own dating life and those of the women around her, and wrote Carrie Bradshaw into it as a semi-autobiographical stand-in.
Q 23Six Feet Under followed a family that ran what kind of business?
A funeral home
A funeral home, Fisher & Sons in Los Angeles, is the family business, and the pilot begins with the father's own death, which pulls prodigal son Nate back into it.
Joe Frazier went down six times in two rounds in Kingston, Jamaica; HBO stayed ringside for 45 years before dropping the sport in 2018, an executive saying it was not a sports network.
Q 14Which long-running PBS children's show sold its first-run rights to HBO in 2015?
Sesame Street
Sesame Street's makers used HBO's money to raise output from 18 to 35 episodes a season, while PBS viewers got each new episode nine months later, still free.
Q 15Which Jim Henson puppet series was co-produced by HBO in the 1980s?
Fraggle Rock
Fraggle Rock was designed from the start for a world audience: the puppet scenes were shared, while several countries filmed their own human segments, so Britain's version was set in a lighthouse.
Q 16Which HBO comedy stars Danny McBride as the eldest son of a family headed by John Goodman?
The Righteous Gemstones
The Righteous Gemstones, created by McBride, follows a dynasty of televangelists; it opens with his character Jesse being blackmailed over a scandalous video while the megachurch empire rolls on.
Q 17Which 1997 prison drama was HBO's first one-hour dramatic series?
Oz
Oz is the nickname of the fictional Oswald prison, and most of the story unfolds in Emerald City, an experimental unit run as a prison within a prison.
Q 18Garry Shandling's 1990s HBO sitcom was set behind the scenes of what?
A late-night talk show
A late-night talk show is the setting of The Larry Sanders Show, where celebrities played exaggerated versions of themselves as Larry's guests across six seasons from 1992 to 1998.
Q 19Marta Kauffman and David Crane created HBO's Dream On before launching which NBC sitcom in 1994?
Friends
Friends arrived four years after Dream On, the 1990 HBO comedy that cut clips from old black-and-white TV shows into scenes to voice its hero's thoughts.
Q 20Who created The Sopranos?
David Chase
David Chase created The Sopranos, drawing on his own New Jersey upbringing; HBO ordered the pilot in 1997 and the series ran 86 episodes from 1999 to 2007.
Q 24Ian McShane played foul-mouthed saloon owner Al Swearengen in which HBO Western?
Deadwood
Deadwood ran three seasons from 2004 to 2006; Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock were both real residents of the 1870s Dakota Territory gold camp.
Q 25Band of Brothers followed which World War II unit?
Easy Company of the 101st Airborne
Easy Company of the 101st Airborne (506th Parachute Infantry Regiment) was the subject of Stephen Ambrose's book; Spielberg and Hanks produced the 2001 miniseries, reusing crew from Saving Private Ryan.
Q 26The Pacific, Band of Brothers' 2010 companion, centred on which branch of the US military?
The Marine Corps
The Marine Corps is its subject: the series draws on the memoirs of Marines Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie, and follows John Basilone, who left a hero's war-bond tour to return to combat and died on Iwo Jima.
Q 27Which HBO comedy grew out of a one-hour 1999 mockumentary special that its star and the network saw as a one-off?
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Curb Your Enthusiasm began with the special Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm; the series kept its loose feel, with David writing only an outline and the cast improvising the dialogue.
Q 28Which film director made the pilot episode of HBO's Boardwalk Empire?
Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese directed the 2010 pilot, his first television episode since 1986, and stayed on as executive producer; lead character Nucky Thompson was based on real Atlantic City boss Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson.
Q 29Game of Thrones ended after 73 episodes in 2019 with which character chosen as king?
Bran Stark
Bran Stark was elected by a council of lords and ladies at Tyrion's urging, ending inherited rule, while his sister Sansa took the North out of the kingdom.
Q 30House of the Dragon is based on which George R. R. Martin book?
Fire & Blood
Fire & Blood is written as a history by a fictional archmaester weighing accounts that contradict one another, so the series has to decide which version of the Targaryen civil war actually happened.