Whether streaming them or broadcasting them or producing limited series out of them or whatever else it has to do as television evolves, HBO is going to continue focusing on the thing it does best: stories.

“Quality content will succeed,” said HBO president of programming Michael Lombardo at the network’s TCA summer press tour session Thursday. Asked if he worries about Netflix and the recent announcement that its streaming subscriber base has grown to 65 million worldwide, Lombardo said that HBO has “never seen the world as binary. People consume quality entertainment however they get it… We try so hard not to program defensively. That’s been our best barometer for success.”

To that end, Lombardo was extremely optimistic about the continuation of HBO’s most popular programming. On the prospect of its massive hit Game of Thrones continuing beyond the originally planned Sseason seven, he said, the “possibility is definitely open – the question has always been, ‘how much beyond the seventh season are we going to do?”

On the notion of a potential Game of Thrones prequel, Lombardo said he would “be open to anything that [show creators and showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff] wanted to do.

Lombardo defended the duo’s choice to implement storylines in the most recent season that some found excessively violent and mysoginistic. “No two showrunners are more careful about not stepping over the line and doing things that are important for the storyline,” he said. Later in the session, he also defended True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, whose second season has received extremely mixed reviews. “We didn’t get into business with Nic thinking this would be a huge hit,” Lombardo said. “I’ve already talked about season three with him and rules are not a conversation I’m interested in having… What he’s doing on True Detective is so much bolder and, for me, more satisfying than so much of what I see in film, that I’d be happy to be in business with him for a long time.”

The unspoken message was that once a storyteller is in with HBO, they’re in, and they are given tremendous freedom – as evidenced by TCA panelists Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, who turned improvised scenes in Mortimer’s rented LA house into the pilot for their show Doll & Em, which airs season two in October. On the other end of the spectrum from their unassuming, awkwardly endearing work, HBO’s most revered tale-tellers also don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

The Wire and Treme creator David Simon has yet another HBO show premiering Aug. 16, Show Me A Hero – perhaps the only series about public housing that will ever air on a massively popular network – and even Larry David and Sopranos creator David Chase are still kicking around. David, said Lombardo, might still have another Curb Your Enthusiasm season inside of him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Larry right here, at a future TCA event,” he said. Meanwhile, Chase is allegedly writing something new for HBO as well. “I’ve seen pages!” Lombardo attested. “I have seen pages.”

Whenever and however those pages come, HBO will take them, so long as they meet the bar of quality it has spent decades creating.

“We’ve never seen the world as binary,” said Lombardo. “People are playing with forms… I don’t ask, ‘Can it go five years anymore?’ If something goes for a year, that is great. If someone comes in with a 15-minute idea, why not? It’s the integrity of the storytelling that the consumer cares about.”

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