Since the streaming wars began, each service took on their own flavour.
HBO - generally decent, prestige television, but has less “content” than other services
Netflix - Quantity over Quality, you get gems sometimes, but also a lot of junk to sort through
Disney+ - A lot of good legacy content and very hit and miss with marvel/disney IPs, fans are willing to complain/ hate watch
So here’s the thing with Apple TV, I didn’t subscribe to it, I bought an apple product and got 3 months free, and the discourse is either love it or just silence. No one seems to ‘hate’ the shows.
The Good - Ted Lasso, Severance were the ones I really enjoyed, Ted Lasso felt genuine, especially with the British sensibilities and I will compare this to Shrinking later, Severance was good and hopefully doesn’t have the mystery box problems
The Mid - Shrinking is from Bill Lawrence who created one of my favourite shows Scrubs, but it’s just super boring, I finished Netflix’s Man on the Inside in a single sitting but couldnt continue Shrinking, compared to Ted Lasso, it also feels fake nice, fake chill.
The Ugly - Foundation is probably one of the worst written sci fi on television now. People hated on ST: Picard very vocally and for Foundation I only found a couple of youtube videos on how bad S1 is.
It’s bad in a way that is not really related to the books, but having the name makes it slightly worse. The writing is basically equivalent to one of the bad Doctor Who episodes but with 10x the budget. You get occasional bursts of brilliance which basically comes out of Asimov’s ideas. However, its extremely hard to point this out and TV fans will defend this, this is not the case with SW shows on Disney plus where people understand the difference between fan service and bad writing. It’s pretty hard to find an opinion on Apple TV shows that says “It’s OK, I didn’t like it” which happens so frequently on Netflix.
I’m not sure why thats the reason, just my observation and wondering if you guys have any opinions on this phenomenon
I don’t often discuss shows that I’ve watched with others but when I do I always feel a little awkward bringing up Apple TV because it feels like that service is tied to their phone/computer business. Like it or not there is this Apple vs Android thing that some people get weird about and I’m always worried the conversation about something on Apple TV is going to be the segue someone is waiting for to start bashing Apple which isn’t really the conversation I’m trying to have so I just don’t go there.
So far I haven’t found much on there that has interested me though. I’ve enjoyed Silo a lot and I also enjoyed Dark Matter but otherwise there hasn’t been much that I’ve really gotten into.
How dare you use an apple product! I know you just said you don’t want to get into it, but I just can’t help myself from making my choice on the duopoly a linchpin of my personality, and now I’m going to be irrationally angry at you for choosing the only other option, even though you probably didn’t choose it, per se, but just went with what you needed to go with because of social factors or because of sales with your (again limited choice of) carriers!
Damn apple cultist /s
So, what you’re saying is that Apple’s alienating marketing is working.
I mean kind of? It definitely is effective in some spheres (blue vs green bubbles) but I don’t think that the Apple TV content is good enough to force anyone’s hand and if the division is enough to make me NOT talk about their content with others that seems self-defeating.