Chris Albrecht, the man who transformed HBO from an obscure film channel into an orginator of hit television series such as Sex and the City and The Sopranos, was fired after his arrest for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend in a Las Vegas car park.

Mr Albrecht, the 54-year-old chairman and chief executive of Time Warner’s HBO division, was arrested on suspicion of “battery” at 3am on Sunday, after attending a super-welter-weight boxing title match, which his network aired.

One of the most influential television executives of his generation, Mr Albrecht spent that night in a police cell.

The district attorney in Las Vegas has not decided whether to charge Mr Albrecht. Nevertheless, his job came under increasing pressure after he admitted on Tuesday, without giving specific details, that his behaviour in Las Vegas had been unacceptable.

“What occurred in Las Vegas this weekend [represented] a wake-up call to me of a weakness I thought I had overcome long ago . . . I had been a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 13 years. Two years ago, I decided that I could handle drinking again. Clearly I was wrong,” Mr Albrecht wrote in an e-mail to his staff.

Mr Albrecht was fired at close to midnight the following day.

He then said in a company announcement: “With great regret, at the request of Time Warner, I have agreed to step down . . . for the benefit of my Home Box Office colleagues, recognising that I cannot allow my personal circumstances to distract them from the business.”

Mr Albrecht’s departure may have been hastened by a report in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, which said that in 1991 HBO paid a settlement of at least $400,000 to a female subordinate, who had accused him of choking her during a confrontation in her office.

The departure of Mr Albrecht, who was also involved with series such as Six Feet Under and Band of Brothers, a collaboration with the BBC that depicts the Second World War and was directed by Steven Spielberg, comes at a difficult time for HBO.

The Sopranos, the Mafia drama and its most popular series to date, is drawing to a close after nearly ten years as the network’s poster child.

The network, which has 28 million subscribers and makes profits of about $1.2 billion (£605 million) a year, is one of Time Warner’s most profitable units.

It is desperately seeking a replacement flagship in an attempt to continue subscriber growth and raise profits.

Mr Albrecht, a former co-owner of the Improv comedy club in New York, had led HBO since July 2002 and had worked at the channel for nearly 20 years before that.

In his first role, he oversaw original programming for HBO and Cinemax, its sister network.

Bill Nelson, HBO’s chief operating officer, will fill in for Mr Albrecht until a permanent replacement is found.

Mr Albrecht and his lawyer, David Chesnoff, declined to comment on the alleged assaults last weekend and in 1991.

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