Apple TV+ working on its core

For All Mankind looks to be the winner in a not-so-stellar streaming lineup

LOS ANGELES The reviews for the first four original series on Apple TV+ — The Morning Show, See, Dickinson and For All Mankind — came out this week, providing the first takes on Apple’s original TV content strategy.

THE MORNING SHOW

Taking on a number of provocative topics, including and especially gender issues emanating from the toxic swamp of the breakfast-hour television industry, The Morning Show — starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell — is perpetually on the human side, punting on the questions it itself puts forward in favour of airily treating them as too complicated. It’s early days for the show, whose first three episodes were provided to critics. But it’s hard to imagine that viewers excited by a series that promises to take on so much will be satisfied by the exhaustion that bleeds out of the writers’ room onto the screen.

SEE

See, a pure genre exercise originating from the mind of writer Steven Knight, sorely craves the sort of pure structural integrity that source material can provide.

Spiralling away from narrative control as its first three episodes unreel, this series, about a post-apocalyptic future in which nearly everyone is blind, wastes the time of Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard, among others, on a story that starts from a position of fun, giddy strangeness and drags itself forward at a lugubrious pace.

Watching Dickinson is a strange experience, and not just because it’s a deliberately strange retelling of poet Emily Dickinson’s life complete with bassheavy needle drops and hallucinations of Death as a man with a Cheshire Cat smirk (played by, this is true, Wiz Khalifa). For all the big creative swings the new Apple TV+ series takes, it feels suspended between several different approaches without committing to a single one. It’s not a comedy, nor a drama, nor even quite a dramedy.

Of the original series launching Apple’s streaming TV service, For All Mankind is by far the strongest. Its production and costume design evolve to fit the changing times, and its handsome direction shines brightest in space. It occasionally entertains a few wry winks to the strange new historical possibilities on this hypothetical timeline, and even indulges in some distracting fictional Nixon tapes revealing the depths to which he might have gone to save face. For the most part, though, it makes the smarter choice to keep the drama as grounded in character choices as possible, with some key overarching “what if?” scenarios that keep the season moving toward a bold new future.