Apple TV + is good, actually

When Apple TV + launched in late 2019, I found the whole idea deeply irritating.

A big tech company entering the streaming game simply because it could, throwing money to attract big names, but without making such great programs? The great and main drama of the service, The Morning Show, Reese Witherspoon boasted and Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell and so many other well-known names, but even at its best, it was just solid, a disappointment for a series with so much known talent.

And even worse than the other streaming service owned by another big tech company – Amazon Prime Video – Apple TV + did not have a library of favorite shows and movies to browse. Subscribers were practically tied to the programs that Apple itself made. And the programs offered at launch were, at best, adequate.

Imagine my reluctant surprise, then, when Apple TV + became one of the streaming services that I used the most during the pandemic, as I found more and more good programs to watch.

Ted Lasso it became the service’s first genuine success, first conquering Twitter on TV and then spreading to the larger sphere of people who like TV comedies. And both Emily Dickinson’s dramatic comedy Dickinson and the drama of the alternative story For all mankind are among the best programs being made at the moment. Meanwhile, the catalog of quality TV service to relax and have fun grows every day. (My favorite show of this type: the noir “children’s detective” House before dark, which has absolutely no clear audience, but is strangely attractive.)

I don’t know if I would call the Apple TV + essential yet, but if you’re willing to spend $ 4.99 to check it out for a month, it’s a decent bet. And, hey, if you have an Apple TV set-top box, it’s probably the best streaming device on the market, channeling all the shows you like into a space that makes it easy to find out what subscriptions you should have to watch them.

The easiest explanation of why Apple TV + is showing so many solid shows now is that it is making an intentionally limited number of them, mimicking the model of a network like HBO or FX and focusing on quality rather than quantity – in contrast to a service like Netflix, which tries to flood the area with more and more material. Of course, not all of Apple’s original series will be a smash hit, and some will still be horrible. But this kind of curated approach leads to more consistently enjoyable programs.

But there is another explanation for why Apple TV + is working so well for me now: it has no clear intellectual property to me.

Apple doesn’t have any major film or TV franchises, so you should look elsewhere for your ideas.

Apple TV +

Intellectual property (IP) is a sophisticated way of saying “stories of which a company owns the rights”. Disney’s intellectual property, for example, includes all animated princesses and Mickey Mouse movies, but also the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars.

The wave of streaming services launched in 2019 and 2020 was defined by the mining of intellectual property. Disney + has programs based on Star Wars and Marvel superheroes, as well as, like, a Powerful ducks Series. Paramount + has so many, so many Star Trek series and HBO Max released with new Looney Toons shorts and new ones added Adventure Time tales soon after. Even Peacock offered sequences for Saved by the gong and Punky Brewster.

I don’t want to miss any of those shows. Some of them are very good! But there is less mountain to climb to get the public interested in yet another story from their favorite superheroes, starship captains, lively friends or brave orphans from the 1980s. You know those names, the theory says. You can feel the strong attraction of nostalgia for the original stories centered on them. And so you can be more easily convinced to invest in new stories built around those names.

I don’t know if this approach has been particularly successful in all sectors – they are you attending Punky Brewster at Peacock? – but it has been the dominant strategy for start-up streaming services. It will only get worse from here. Every service I’ve mentioned is overwhelming spinoffs, sequences and remakes of titles and characters you’ve heard of, even if you don’t have a firm memory of, say, Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers (a program that will receive an updated version on Disney +). More established services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu are less dependent on intellectual property to some extent, but even they are devouring existing jobs to adapt.

To be clear, Apple TV + is very much in the IP business as well. Ted Lasso is technically an adaptation of a series of commercials about a bumbling American who starts coaching a football team, while House before dark it is loosely based on the real story of a girl who became a reporter narrating what was going on in her neighborhood. (I’m not sure if we can call real people “intellectual property”, but grant me that stories based on real people are a kind of adaptation.)

Apple is also adapting books and remaking old TV shows, and has made shows with Snoopy and many other comic book characters Peanut. Eventually, he will launch a big successful program, a Weird stuff or one Bridgerton, one Servant’s Tale or one Boys, and will bet everything on this success. (It is also worth remembering that the company makes and acquires films, and is a distributor of the very good documentary Boys State and the tremendous animated film Wolfwalkers.)

But there is a crucial difference between what Apple’s IP strategy means and what, say, Disney + (which also launched in late 2019) is doing. Apple TV + is mainly adapting books and, mainly, choosing titles that have not been adapted to the screen before. But Disney + isn’t particularly interested in buying the rights to the book when the Disney vault is right there, full of IP that it can reimagine for the streaming era. This is not to say that Disney + never adapts properties that were not yet films or TV shows (his 2020 film The Only Ivan it is based on a book that has not been adapted previously, for example), but it shows how projects that develop from already successful Disney properties have an advantage.

Apple TV + has no choice but to look elsewhere for its ideas. When you combine this challenge with your focus on creating less successful shows more consistently, it seems more likely that it will give the green light to exciting and original projects that don’t look like other things on TV. Say what you want about M. Night Shyamalan’s gothic and schlocky horror drama Servant, but it’s hard to compare it to anything else in the air right now.

Will this translate to viewers who think of Apple TV + as a home for quality programs? It is already working at the edges. Ted Lasso it is a genuine success, and Dickinson, for all mankind, and Little america (a dramatic anthology of immigrant stories produced by Epic, a subsidiary of Vox Media) has substantial educated audiences. Combine good shows like this and Apple TV + can no longer be a curiosity or a must for many TV fans.

The Apple TV + approach will not always result in good television – it’s the Jason Momoa vehicle To see it’s hilarious and bad – and it won’t always result in a memorable television. Even with its overall quality rising, Apple TV + still makes many memorable shows, like its musical drama Little voice, which brought new songs by Sara Bareilles and which I could not tell about beyond what I know I have seen at some point.

But making fewer programs, based on more recent ideas, is a smart way to build a streaming service with the goal of standing out in the long run, especially if these programs come from creative voices that can bring new perspectives to the air. (Dickinson creator Alena Smith, for example, was primarily a staff writer for Showtime The case before launching his cool mash-up of romantic longing, real history and exaggerated dramas. Time will tell whether this approach will be more successful than simply adding a streaming service with familiar titles and characters, but as a fan of a new and original television, I’m hoping it works.