Well, that was quite the public-relations pratfall by Netflix.</p><p>With customers abandoning the streaming-and-DVD service and its stock price in freefall, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings last week posted his idea of an apology to his blog, saying he&#x92;d &#x93;messed up&#x94; in rolling out a controversial price hike in July.</p><p>But then Hastings just made things worse, telling his DVD-by-mail customers &#x97; the ones who built his company from scratch &#x97; that they would soon be banished to a stripped-down service called Qwikster, rhymes with trickster. Twenty thousand angry comments later, Hastings was back with a poolside video apologizing for the previous apology.</p><p>Leaving aside whether Netflix was smart to split itself in two or raise its rates (or grovel before customers), I thought the more devastating news for the future of Netflix came on Sept. 1. That was the day that Starz, the No. 3 pay-cable service, said it would pull its titles from Netflix when their deal expires in February.</p><p>Starz is an up-and-comer, and it&#x92;s time we paid it some attention. From its creation in 1994 until three years ago, Starz was a movie channel. (&#x93;No. 1 in New Hit Movies!&#x94; was a slogan you&#x92;d hear in radio ads.)</p><p>In 2008, however, it produced its first one-hour original, a terrific, high-energy adaptation of &#x93;Crash,&#x94; the 2006 Oscar champion. At that moment it seemed Starz was poised to contend with FX and AMC as emerging powers in cable.</p><p>But much like AMC &#x97; whose budget woes have been a drama of their own &#x97; Starz simply could not make that happen. Financially, it&#x92;s dependent on movie buffs, and they dropped their Starz subscriptions in 2009, perhaps owing to the bad economy. On top of that, producing original shows is not as easy as it looks.</p><p>The next attempt by Starz, the &#x93;Spartacus&#x94; series, stumbled out of the gate (and its original star, Andy Whitfield, fell ill and recently died of lymphoma at age 39). But that was followed by a prequel, &#x93;Spartacus: Gods of the Arena,&#x94; that was well received, and a new season, titled &#x93;Spartacus: Vengeance,&#x94; is on the way.</p><p>Starz&#x92;s biggest hit to date has been &#x93;Camelot,&#x94; a re-imagining of the Arthurian tale starring Joseph Fiennes that played this spring to so-so reviews and excellent ratings. But Starz scrapped &#x93;Camelot&#x94; after one season, citing &#x93;significant production challenges.&#x94; (So take heart, fans of &#x93;The Walking Dead,&#x94; whose producer was fired and budget slashed after pulling in record ratings; at least AMC didn&#x92;t kill off the show.)</p><p>That brings us to Starz&#x92;s &#x93;Boss,&#x94; a drama about big-city politics starring Kelsey Grammer as the mayor of Chicago, which begins Oct. 21.</p><p>Talkier and more character-driven than those earlier genre series, &#x93;Boss&#x94; marks a change of direction for the network under CEO Chris Albrecht, who was hired in 2009. Before that, Albrecht worked for HBO for 22 years and was its CEO and chairman in 2007 when he exited under a cloud (he was arrested after scuffling with his girlfriend).</p><p>Albrecht has been careful to say he&#x92;s not trying to compete with his former employer, but when you watch &#x93;Boss,&#x94; it sure looks like he&#x92;s at least trying to emulate HBO. There is strong dialogue and a familiar, understated polish to the show.</p><p>Gus Van Sant directed the pilot and is an executive producer. A signature scene comes early in the pilot episode, when Mayor Tom Kane (Grammer) takes a young politician up to the rooftop garden of City Hall for a talk. Kane has an agenda here, but he lays it out grandly, giving his would-be prot&#xE9;g&#xE9; a spiel about the history of Chicago&#x92;s modern mayors, starting with Anton Cermak in the Depression.</p><p>&#x93;The Germans &#x85; Polonia Triangle &#x85; the blacks &#x85; the Irish &#x85; these were tribes,&#x94; Kane says. &#x93;They fought, maimed, killed, rioted against each other. Cermak weaved a thread through the lot of them and pulled them in.&#x94;</p><p>As he talks, the skyline vanishes and, through the magic of CGI, we see past downtown into the 50 wards that stretch as far as the eye can see. The wards that make the mayor king.</p><p>Albrecht has announced his intent to ramp up Starz&#x92;s production of original shows, and you can bet he structured the deal with Grammer HBO-style, so that if &#x93;Boss&#x94; clicks, it comes back for Season 2.</p><p>He also got Starz out of that damaging deal with Netflix, which was signed before his arrival. Until recently, Netflix customers could stream movies licensed exclusively to Starz by several studios, notably Sony and Disney, for about half the price of a Starz subscription. That&#x92;s over now.</p><p>Titles like &#x93;Up,&#x94; &#x93;Stuart Little,&#x94; &#x93;The Proposal&#x94; and &#x93;Da Vinci Code&#x94; have been pulled from streaming, and when the Starz deal expires, they&#x92;ll be unavailable to any Netflix/Qwikster customer.</p><p>Starz is growing again, with 19 million paying households, and is working on services that will let viewers watch its movies and shows anywhere, much like the HBO2Go feature. Forget about being the next HBO, though.</p><p>At the rate it&#x92;s going, Starz might be the real Netflix.