Apple TV+: should you shell out for the new streaming service?
This month, the streaming wars enter a brutal new age. After years of market dominance, the likes of Netflix and Amazon must face down two huge new competitors. In the US (and early next year in the UK), Disney+ will enter the fray. In the meantime there’s Apple, which is getting in on the act with Apple TV+.
For cash-strapped viewers, the thought of shelling out another £4.99 a month to add to an already insurmountable pile of unwatched content may be off-putting. So is Apple TV+ worth the subscription? I’ve dredged through its launch slate of original shows to find out.
The Morning Show
The buzziest Apple original so far, The Morning Show benefits from two things. First is its powerhouse trio of leads, in the form of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell. Second is its timeliness. Intentionally or otherwise, The Morning Show is basically The Matt Lauer Story, telling the story of an ostensibly lightweight breakfast TV show derailed by accusations of sexual impropriety. Everything about The Morning Show – the themes, the set design, the minor key acoustic cover songs – screams of Sorkinesque prestige. But it guns for this status a little too aggressively in the pilot, opting to focus on themes over character. In episodes two and three, the show starts to relax, and becomes quite enjoyable. Worth a subscription? A tentative yes.
Dickinson
Hailee Steinfeld stars as Emily Dickinson, “Poet. Daughter. Total rebel.” Such is the premise of this period drama, in which one of America’s greatest writers rolls her eyes and mutters “this is such bullshit” before it cuts to an opening sequence with a dubstepa-like soundtrack. This – not to mention the ballroom dancing sequences soundtracked by I Like Tuh by Carnage – may be enough to horrify many conservative historical scholars, were it not for the fact that Dickinson is actually really good. True, the script shies away a little from the manic depression and agoraphobia that plagued the poet’s later life in favour of painting her as a spunky teen, but it’s hard to think of a vehicle better suited to deliver her poetry to a new generation. Steinfeld is reliably brilliant in the lead, as is Jane Krakowski, who brings the entire spectrum of Fey/Carlock cadences to her role as Dickinson’s mother. Worth a subscription? Yes.
See
Steven Knight’s infinite Rolodex of batshit (most recently: Serenity, in which Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey play characters in a videogame designed by their own abused son) stops at See; a sci-fi series about an alternative future where everyone is blind, including a privileged aristocracy that lives in an abandoned factory, listens to old Lou Reed albums and prays via the medium of cunnilingus. If you’ve ever wanted to see
Jason Momoa play a version of himself where he has to feel everything with his hands before he can tell what it is, this is the show for you. But it isn’t the show for you, because it is bad. It is Hemlock Grove bad. It’s so bad that you can physically see the cast squirming at all the dumb stuff they have been asked to do. Every stupid incantation they are made to chant. Every idiot animal horn they are made to honk into. The dramatic highlight of episode one – and I’m not kidding here – is some people walking gingerly over a bridge. Worth a subscription? Absolutely not.
For All Mankind
After the comparative failures of First Man and The First, hopes weren’t high for yet another story about an astronaut in the 1960s. But For All Mankind is a different and much better beast. It’s Ronald D Moore’s what-if story, set in a timeline where the USSR beat the US to the moon and carefully following the subsequent ripple effect. The consequences start off small – Ted Kennedy is so shaken by the mission failure that he cancels his trip to Chappaquiddick – and spread out with beautifully attended logic. By episode three, the US has recruited its first female astronauts to accelerate the space race. By episode six, we venture even further into the realms of fiction. There is almost limitless storytelling potential here, but all the farflung space stuff is grounded by a quiet, Mad Man-esque presence on the ground. This is the show that Apple TV + is making the least amount of noise about, but it’s by far the best. Worth a subscription? Yes.
The Elephant Queen
It’s a documentary about an elephant. A nice, well-made documentary about an elephant, but a documentary about an elephant nevertheless. It’s the sort of thing they used to show at Imax cinemas before they realised that people just wanted to watch Mission: Impossible films really big. That’s about it. Worth a subscription? Probably not, no.
The verdict: Overall, it isn’t worth subscribing to Apple TV+ quite yet. With the exception of See, Apple’s launch shows are pretty decent, but there just aren’t enough of them. Wait a couple of months – at least until the drama in which Octavia Spencer plays a true-crime podcaster and the two documentaries Oprah has in the works – grab a free trial and we’ll take it from there.