I watched a lot of people shouting this weekend. Mainly Reese Witherspoon. That’s because I consumed as much Apple TV+ as it’s possible to consume from Friday night to Sunday night.
Apple’s new service, which costs £4.99 a month and offers a seven day free trial, is now live in the UK. At launch, there are eight original shows alongside access to paid for titles and packages.
Eight shows isn’t a lot, and the three splashiest ones only have three episodes each for launch week. More will follow weekly, in what looks like a bid for appointment viewing. But we know there’s plenty still to come, including Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant and Truth Be Told with Octavia Spencer and Aaron Paul.
Of the eight shows live for launch, three are actually kids shows and one is Oprah’s Book Club, plus there’s a nice, nature documentary. There’s a lot of book love across the whole line-up actually. Books and space are the guiding stars of the Apple TV+ cinematic universe. And Snoopy. And smoking. When you spend all weekend treating Apple TV+ like tapas, everything becomes connected.
Apple’s own devices are also something of a motif, so I decided to track iProduct placement throughout this first batch of shows. If Apple wants to convince millions of people to switch to TV+, or add it to their monthly subscriptions, it’ll need to deliver on its promise to make “original stories from creative minds”. So I also looked at its ‘related’ recommendations and the shows it’s competing with on rival services.
It’s worth noting that Apple is spending a lot of money promoting absolutely the wrong two shows, at least as far as the bus and tube adverts in London are concerned. Let’s start with those.
The Morning Show
The first hour of The Morning Show, set in and around a glitzy-but-slumping US news show, made me extremely miserable. Hours two and three were better but I still haven’t forgiven writers Kerry Ehrin and Jay Carson for that first episode of charming, funny stars whingeing and screaming at each other (and the terrific supporting cast) about sexual misconduct and coal mines, to precisely no end. I blame Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell for signing on to this unnecessary angst, I blame the editors for not chopping 15 minutes of terrible writing off each episode. I blame myself.
There’s still a chance The Morning Show will pick up, now the three stars have all had their two or three big speeches about truth and journalism and #MeToo. But three episodes in, this is repetitive TV that doesn’t trust its audience and manages to be quite unpleasant with next to zero pay off.
More like this: The first ‘related’ suggestion that comes up in the Apple TV feed is Succession, HBO’s acid-tongued media empire show. Succession (Sky/Now TV) is also about a bunch of unlikeable, powerful people who get driven around in fancy cars but its tone, plotting and characterisation place it dozens of sleek Manhattan office floors above The Morning Show. Netflix will soon have its starry Fox News movie Bombshell, too.
Starring iphoness: If you viewed the first episode in isolation, you’d think this is a show about rich people waking up at 3am to look at their iphonesss. The vibrate function serves as a minor character throughout.
See
Tim! TIM. What were you thinking? After Apple’s CEO Tim Cook reportedly halted development on Dr. Dre biopic Vital Signs for having too much sex and violence, he’s seemingly chosen to burn through all his R-rated capital on See, which includes a scene of an unhinged queen praying aloud while… taking care of herself. This is not edgy, Tim.
It’s also not even the cringiest thing about See, by far the worst of this first batch of programming. Jason Momoa fronts this story of a tribal, post-apocalyptic world, where no-one can see. The Age of Empires vibes and a few tense set pieces aside, the OTT accents, lush forests and wince-inducing dialogue get tedious very quickly. It’s verging on so bad it’s good. See is also responsible for one of the most unpleasant beard and hair combinations to ever appear on a TV show.
More like this: Don’t do it, don’t do it... They did it. They put Game of Thrones as the first pick for similar shows to See. So not only is Jason Momoa’s Drogo, I mean Baba Voss, here – there’s also revenge, birds, female nudity, a creepy, crusty magic mime acrobat and just a hint of aunt incest. (Is aunt incest the new touchstone of prestige TV?) No sign of any real wits or rogues, though.
Starring iphoness: None so far but quite a few plastic bottles have survived.
For All Mankind
We’ve had a lot of Apollo 11 content this year but if you have even the first symptoms of a Mission Control fetish, and you’re going to stream one thing on Apple TV+, stream Ronald D. Moore’s alt-history space race drama For All Mankind. It’s 1969 and the ‘Soviets’ have landed the first man on the moon with NASA and Nixon scrambling to respond.
On the basis of the first three episodes, this is tense and joyful and moving, not to mention the best use of Apple’s big budgets on the service so far. The acting, the direction, the costumes, it’s all very good indeed with an extra kick from the sometimes playful, sometimes dark speculative storytelling. We’ll know by the end of the season if it can amount to something genuinely special.
More like this: In this case, For All Mankind looks like it can go lander-to-lander with the related recs on Apple TV: Apollo 11, Mad Men, Hidden Figures, First Man etc. If you liked the latter especially, you’ll probably like this.
Starring iphoness: None to speak of, this is ‘69. That said, Moore is said to have mapped out a lot of seasons when he pitched this to Apple’s execs so it’s entirely feasible the narrative could run until April 1976 when the Apple I was released. To be honest we’d respect that.
Oprah’s Book Club
Ta-Nehisi Coates is eloquent and thought-provoking and Oprah is Oprah in the first, hour-long installment of Apple TV+’s Book Club. The slight hiccup for UK viewers is that Coates’ first novel The Water Dancer isn’t published here until February 2020 so we’ll no doubt be a few months behind the series of interviews.
Starring iphoness: Starring Apple Watch, Apple Store, Oprah saying Apple TV+ - “love that plus” and generally just the word Apple a lot in the intro. Expect this every time.
Dickinson
Dickinson is a riot. Hailee Steinfeld is charming enough to pull off the zany pathos of teenage Emily Dickinson writing poems and getting into scrapes in early 19th century Amherst, Massachusetts. All ten 28-minute episodes are live on the service at launch, and although the series goes wheeling off in all sorts of directions, creator Alena Smith is having so much fun that it somehow works. When she’s not rebelling against the patriarchy, Emily talks to Death (Wiz Khalifa), goes to visit Thoreau and peer pressures her horny friends into doing opium. When it’s earnest, it’s very earnest but it’s likely to be one of the TV+ seasons I complete.
More like this: Apple is pitching this at the discerning Lady Bird/Fleabag/Booksmart crowd, judging by its recommendations. To be fair, this is basically Booksmart in petticoats.
Starring iphoness: It’s the 1840s. Then again, they have twerking there so who knows.
The Elephant Queen
“Oh wise and gentle soul”. Chiwetel Ejiofur steps into the Attenborough seat for this quite beautiful narrative nature documentary about Athena, a matriarch “giant tusker” elephant in Kenya. One from the festival circuit, The Elephant Queen is also getting a cinema release which bodes well for future Apple TV+ films.
Starring iphoness: Goose chicks, watering holes, foam frog orgies. No iphonesss.
Ghostwriter
This follows a bunch of kids you wouldn’t want to hang out with and gives them lazy monster-of-the-week plots like Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Mowgli coming to life. It’s based on a BBC/PBS show from the early 90s and to be honest, should have stayed there.
Starring iphoness: In episode two, a character named Donna uses pinch to zoom on an iphoness to see tiny Alice. She then makes herself tiny before sitting on the iphoness with tiny Alice; it vibrates with a call, they fall off. Meanwhile her brother uses Find my iphoness, which isn’t named but is implied, to track her down. To millennials, it’s all quite embarrassing, though gen alpha may disagree.
Helpsters
I’m not really qualified to judge kids’ shows. This one is a Sesame Street spinoff and it features puppets that help humans to make problem-solving plans.
Starring iphoness: I can’t be the first person to think that Helpsters is the Genius Bar. In episode one, the tablet is at least covered in a blue case, not an obvious ipads, signalling that Apple appears to have a minimum age for its product placement.
Snoopy in Space
Now we’re talking. These seven minute shorts are very much Snoopy cartoons, not melancholy Charlie Brown masterpieces, but they’re fun and will appeal to children who want to learn, like really learn, about space, the ISS and everything.
Starring iphoness: More like starring Nasa.
Should you subscribe to Apple TV+?
If you are the kind of person who remembers to cancel a seven day subscription or you’ve just bought an Apple device that comes with a year free, go for it. Three episodes is plenty to help you decide whether any of the marquee shows take your fancy. For All Mankind, Dickinson and The Elephant Queen are all high quality entries in their respective categories and the upcoming slate looks very promising. You don’t have to watch the Jennifer Aniston show.
The service itself has quite a few UI hiccups. The overall navigation and basic features like ‘resume episode’ and ‘skip intro’ are a little buggy and unfinished. At one point, we lost Oprah. Plus with so little original programming in these first few weeks, most of what you see in the Apple TV app on your iphoness, ipads or smart TV interface will be paid for and not included in the £4.99 monthly subscription.
Don’t come to TV+ for quantity just yet, either. This is extremely early days for Apple TV+ and we might find that in a year or three (or five), it’s competing with Netflix, Disney+ and whatever is left of HBO.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
