Launch sequence: Apple’s new streaming exercise

More than 50 buildings and soundstages sprawl across the 18 hectares of the sony pictures lot. That's a lot of windowless oblongs, and even more distance between them. If you need to get from, say, the Jimmy Stewart Building to Stage 15, golf carts and Sprinter vans are the customary mode – even on sunny days. On a particular Saturday in February, while an atmospheric river settled over

Los Angeles, those vehicles were a necessity. The downpour was bad luck for the dozens of journalists there that day, but it was also a touch allegorical. After what felt like years of anticipation, Apple was about to take us behind the scenes of a show it was making for its still mysterious, still unnamed subscription streaming service. We were going to find out if Apple, maker of so many devices that have redefined the way we consume content, could finally make content – good content – of its own. »

With Ron Moore’s space-race drama For All Mankind, Apple is betting on marquee names and lush production to get its TV+ service off the ground. Can it achieve orbit?

After the journalists handed their phones to Apple staffers to be taped up with camera-blocking stickers, the vans shuttled the group to Stage 15. Dryness maintained, we walked into the control room of NASA’S Manned Spacecraft

Centre circa 1969.

Mission Control, as it’s more commonly known, was painstakingly refurbished by NASA in its original Houston location and reopened to the public earlier this year. The Hollywood version in front of us, taking up almost 750 square metres of Stage 15, is its utter replica, from the soft packs of Kools strewn on long tiers of desks to the million-buttoned BOOSTER consoles that tracked the Saturn V rockets powering the Apollo spacecraft into orbit. Rotary phones. Horn-rimmed glasses. Even the ceiling tiles have been custom-made to match the ones in Houston.

Such millimeterperfect verisimilitude is to be expected. After all, we’re standing in a Ronald D. Moore project. A veteran of multiple

Star Trek series and creator of numerous other shows, including the beloved mid-’00s space opera Battlestar Galactica, Moore is known for paradigmbusting genre television, creating worlds that are meticulously designed and populated by fully realised characters. This newest project, a series called For All Mankind, imagines how our society might look today had the space race never ended.

It’s at once rueful and optimistic, a journey that undoes decades of declining ambition by imagining how an alternate past spawns a new future.

For all its attention to the little things, though, For All

Mankind is bigger and riskier than anything Moore has created. The show is one of the first series appearing on the (now named) Apple

TV+ streaming service, a multibillion-dollar push that includes projects from Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey. And Mission Control is more than the simulated nerve centre for the zero-g space walks and lunar landings of For All Mankind. It’s also the launchpad for Apple’s own moon shot. The company sits at a crossroads, its hardware approaching market saturation and its updates increasingly incremental; part of the path forward, by its own admission, involves being a purveyor of services. So, after Apple’s two decades of windfall as a manufacturer and distributor, TV+ is the company’s highly anticipated – and very expensive – attempt to become an entertainment studio, one that competes not just with the upstarts that inaugurated the streaming wars (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) but also with the old hands that are now trying to muscle in (Disney, Warner Bros., Nbcuniversal). The landscape is crowded, but there’s room among the stars.

Cupertino, we have lift-off.

Twenty

years ago, with three simple words, Steve

Jobs changed the way the public saw Apple.

One more thing … read the screen at the end of his Macworld Expo keynote speech in San Francisco that January. It was actually five more things – blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime, and strawberry, the colours of the new translucent imacs he announced – but the construction stuck. For the next 12 years, the line became Jobs’ catchphrase, the showman’s wink at Apple’s cycle of secrecy and surprise.

By the time Tim Cook replaced Jobs as CEO in 2011, Apple had thrust most of its best secrets into daylight – itunes, iphones, ipads – but one rumour Cook could still dance around was the company’s plans for television. (Apple had released a Macintosh back in 1993 that could display a TV feed, but the curio lasted only a few months on the market.) Industry watchers had long wondered what the company might have in store. ‘Intense interest’ became Cook’s favorite side step – as in, TV was ‘an area of intense interest for us’. In those days, he was referring to the experience of watching television. The Apple TV set-top device, which launched in 2007, was beginning to gain some sales steam by its third generation, and the company was widely believed to be prototyping an Apple-branded TV set.

Over the years, though, Cook’s intense interest began to shift. According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple approached Time Warner about acquisition in mid-2016; some even suspected the company might make a bid for Netflix. Neither happened, but by then what was once called ‘web television’ had come into its own, and streaming content took on a new urgency. Amazon had won multiple Emmys for its original show Transparent, and Hulu had evolved from a platform that just delivered the previous day’s cable shows to one with its own slate of original programming.

Apple seemed ready to jump into the pool. Cook began trumpeting the performance of the company’s ‘services’ division, which included itunes, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and the App Store. Services were by then second only to the iphone in generating revenue for Apple, and Cook said he saw more growth for that group ahead. Part of it, it seemed, would come from television; Apple quietly began filming Vital Signs, a show based on the life of hip hop legend Dr. Dre (co-founder of headphone maker Beats, which Apple bought in 2014). The show, which reportedly contained sex and violence, would be watchable via itunes and Apple TV boxes. Soon, Apple also developed a Shark Tank-style reality show called Planet of the Apps, which the company began casting in the summer of 2016; then a series based on Carpool Karaoke, a perma-viral segment from James Corden’s late-night NBC talk show.

In October 2016, during a quarterly earnings call with

IF APPLE WERE A PERSON – IF IT TRULY TOOK MORTAL FORM – THAT FORM MIGHT BE RONALD MOORE.