AppleTV+ recommendations
Oct. 11th, 2023 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeselenak, and then realised this is something I discuss a lot, and it might be beneficial to have an actual post I can update and point people to. AppleTV+ should be the most superfluous streaming service, right? It's the perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with the streaming landscape: tech companies think they can make entertainment.
Unfortunately, AppleTV+ has invested a great deal of money into making a small number of very good shows.They're not all winners, but it has a much higher success-to-failure rate than the other streamers. It's frankly outrageous. They're sufficiently consistent that my household actually pays for our subscription instead of just getting a few free months here and there whenever we get a new device.
So if you find yourself with a free period, here are some recommendations:
Drama
The Morning Show is terrible. It thinks it's a prestige drama with a lot to say about the state of the media and the modern world. It has Sorkinesque aspirations.
It's actually a trashy workplace soap opera with a weirdly remarkable cast. Season 2 sees a character die by driving their car off an Italian cliff during the covid epidemic while Reese Witherspoon's character embarks on a relationship with a coworker played by Julianna Margulies. Jon Hamm plays a character best described as "sexy Elon Musk" or "fuckable Zuckerberg". Tig Notaro has two scenes as his assistant. Why? Who knows? This is not a good show, and not really a good example of the streamer's programming (it was launched as the flagship drama, and, um), but I can't stop watching.
[Content notes: the series opens with the characters facing a #MeToo scandal which escalates as sexual assaults are uncovered; a character commits suicide; the depiction of the early days of covid is all too real, and in line with its prestige pretensions, season 3 involves Reese's plucky reporter being on the ground in the Capitol on 6 Jan.]
WeCrashed is a dramatisation of the rise and fall of WeWork. This is another one that transcends mere questions of whether a show is "good" or "bad". It's thorougly entertaining and, at eight episodes, doesn't overstay its welcome.
[Content notes: Jared Leto.]
Slow Horses is an extremely unglamorous, down-to-earth British spy thriller. Gary Oldman plays an over-the-hill spy who has been pensioned off to The Place Where MI5 Stashes Its Incompetents, where he spends his time day drinking and engaging in workplace bullying, and very reluctantly occasionally rallying his crew to save the world. Or at least a small, British corner of it.
Kristen Scott Thomas and Sophie Okonedo play the top brass of MI5, and various generations of character actors appear in various roles.
[Content notes: Gary Oldman. And his character is thoroughly odious, too. Season 1 involves the abduction of a Muslim student by right wing extremists.]
Science Fiction
For All Mankind is an alternate history in which the USSR land a man on the moon before the United States, spurring a never-ending space race.
The second episode of this series is literally one of the worst things I have ever watched, with a lot of white American men being sad their destiny failed to manifest. Then in episode 3, someone goes, "Hey, maybe we can ... let women? Be astronauts?" And the next thing I knew, it was the season finale and I was utterly hooked, and now this is one of my favourite series.
Produced by Ronald D. Moore and has a bunch of ex-DS9 writers, if you're into that sort of thing. It has its flaws, but they're interesting ones, like the decision to use old age make-up instead of recasting characters, so you get to season 3 -- which is set in the '90s -- and have a lot of incredibly youthful 60 and 70 year olds running about.
[Content notes: depictions of mental illness, racism, sexism, homophobia, addiction. Season 2 features a relationship between a middle-aged woman and her friend's son, who is in his late teens or early 20s.]
Silo is an adaptation of Wool by Hugh Howey. I hadn't read the book when I watched it, and found it utterly compelling. It tells the story of a self-contained subterranean society in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. Or is it? I liked the characters, but I LOVED the worldbuilding. And after I read the book, I also loved the decision to gender-flip the heroine's mentor and cast Harriet Walter as a grumpy, agoraphobic lesbian.
[Content notes: nothing I can recall, oddly. I'm sure I've forgotten something.]
Foundation is an adaptation of the Isaac Asimov series. Where Silo is fairly faithful to its source, Foundation goes, "Okay, Isaac, you have all these bonkers ideas, but you know what you don't have? Women. People of colour. Queer people. Hey, what if a robot was a woman and she fucked? You need more clones, too."
The first season is quite messy, with a lot of ideas being thrown around while the plot unfolds verrrrrrry slowly. One reviewer compared it to a screensaver: it's gorgeous, but is anything really happening? Season 2 fixed that problem, although still involved a lot of people chasing a magic rubik's cube.
But is it really about the plot? Or is it about two characters who are close in age realising they're mother and daughter? Lee Pace playing an eternal line of clones, and also committing genocide while wearing a torn mesh top and culottes? Ben Davis playing a tortured general with an inappropriately young husband? The most delightful demisexual space cleric? Rachel House running a cult?
It's actually quite respectful of Asimov's ideas, in that it takes them very seriously while subverting expectations. The worst people in fandom hate it, which honestly is more than enough of a recommendation for me.
[Content notes: violence, death, misuse of mathematics. A sexual relationship between an adult clone and the robot who raised him from infancy.]
Severance is an SF psychological thriller whose protagonists have had their minds "severed" so that at home they have no memories of their time at work, and at work they have no memories of their time at home. (In fact, they do not even remember consenting to the severing process.)
It's a thriller -- needless to say, the company is up to no good -- but also just remarkably stylish and surreal in the way you'd expect from, say, a British surrealist spy drama of the '60s or early '70s. And also unexpectedly funny, though it's not at all a comedy. Did you need a tentative romance between John Turturro and Christopher Walken in your life? If the answer is yes, Apple is here for you.
[Content notes: I can't remember! Save that, despite being a show about workplace abuses, I remember reading that conditions on the set weren't great? I mean. Apple.]
Comedy
Ted Lasso is the tale of an American football coach who is hired to manage a premier-league soccer football team in London. He doesn't know anything about soccer, but that's okay, this is the team's new owner's ploy to destroy the one thing her ex-husband loves.
Ted Lasso has been massively hyped, and unfortunately lives up to it. I mean, some people say it doesn't hold up outside of a covid lockdown where everyone is desperate for connection (and this is very much a show about building connections), and some people hated the way the series ended (but it was exactly what I expected). It's kind of annoying that it's so good, because I am exactly the sort of grumpy contrarian who would like to hate it. But I did not.
[Content notes: boss/employee relationship; extremely heteronormative until season 3; some people were mad their OTPs didn't get together.]
Dickinson is an irreverent look at the early adult life of Emily Dickinson, her family, friends, and most of all, her romantic relationship with her best friend and sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert.
Often compared to The Great because both series are about young women and deal in intentional anachronisms, but I actually think Dickinson does a better job, not least because Emily's relationship with reality is extremely tenuous. Riding in a literal carriage with Death? Who is played by Wiz Khalifa? Sure! Travelling to the future and meeting Sylvia Plath? Absolutely! It works because the series is absolutely steeped in love and respect for Dickinson's life and work. I read a detailed bio of Dickinson between seasons, and was impressed at how much truth there was in the series.
[Content notes: got a lot of criticism, especially in season 1, for using a massive amount of Black music without including Black characters to any great extent. This was corrected to an extent in the ensuing seasons, especially with the addition of Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) to both the cast and the writing team, but still didn't quite click for some viewers.]
Mythic Quest is a workplace comedy set in a video game company. Notable for the extremely platonic relationship between the male and female leads, the fact that the female lead is an Australian woman of colour who is, frankly, really hard work and not very likeable (I love her), and its deep knowledge and affection for nerd culture.
I haven't watched the third season yet, because it's oddly loud in a way that I need to be in the right mood for, but it's a really good time if you've played video games or spent any time in the WorldCon end of the SFF community.
[Content notes: F Murray Abraham played an elderly, Hugo Award-winning novelist who was brought on to write the titular game, but actually spends most of his time being a racist, sexist jerk. Apparently art imitated life, because he was fired for harassment in the third season. This is good, but also a shame because honestly, it was an amazing satire of that guy we all know in fandom. Season 2 features a standalone episode about that character in his youth, and it's one of the best depictions of the SF community of the 1950s that I've ever seen.]
And also
Making this post, I've realised there's so much on AppleTV+ that I haven't watched yet. The Pachinko adaptation. A series about Idris Elba on a hijacked plane. Something with Tom Hiddleston as a horny priest? And they all have okay-or-better reviews. Literally the only thing on the service I've seen get actively bad reviews was Invasion, and honestly? Fair. Everything else seems to be mediocre-or-better, and as you can see, right now Apple's mediocrity is still better than a Netflix original that will be cancelled after a season. Apple seems to be using its bottomless wealth to take creative risks, and I respect that a lot.
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Date: 2023-10-11 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-11 01:01 am (UTC)I’m curious to see what Apple will do with Lessons in Chemistry in a few days. I had a lot of problems with the book, but I can see how it might make good TV.
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Date: 2023-10-11 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-11 02:04 am (UTC)For All Mankind I did like. It'll be interesting to see where they're going with it this season.
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Date: 2023-10-11 04:49 am (UTC)Everything you describe sounds amazing...and I mean that in a sincere way, and also in an excuse me, what sort of way.
Lee Pace in culottes!
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Date: 2023-10-11 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-11 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-11 05:12 am (UTC)Typically the streamers will like put out one thing I want to see and it's easy enough to find elsewhere, but if one company is making enough good stuff, that does seem like something I want to support. But like you say, Apple TV is a raging symptom of what's wrong about the streaming industry right now.
There is so much good stuff to watch! But it also makes me feel so guilty, because the streaming industry is fucking the creators over so hard without lube right now. Even after the strike. It's like when the pro publishers decided, no, we own the rights to ebooks, and we'll get all the money from them, because the dead writer didn't specifically sign for the electronic rights in like 1965! Jesus.
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Date: 2023-10-11 05:45 am (UTC)They did WHAT now?
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Date: 2023-10-11 06:32 am (UTC)It was a while back but I think this covers it https://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/ebook_rights.html
I remembered it wrong, though, it was one trad pub suing Open Road when they published an ebook. I want to say there was a lawsuit by the Steinbeck family about ebook rights, too, but it's really hard to find stuff on Google anymore.
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Date: 2023-10-11 08:05 am (UTC)We really had to put up with so much more shit regarding female characters in sci fi not too long ago, huh?)
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Date: 2023-10-11 08:49 am (UTC)....yeah, in all kinds of shows....I'm watching The Wire for the first time, and damn, it's a brilliant show, but there are also nearly no women in it, and when women do show up it's nearly always in relation to the men. -- Lost kinda did better, but still had Jack as the leader instead of Kate. Fringe and Heroes and Warehouse 13 started off with central women characters, especially Fringe -- but then the creators decided it had been Peter's story all along! And let us not talk about Firefly and Dollhouse and whatever the fuck was going on re Martha on Dr Who. We did have Alias and Terminator: Sara Connor Chronicles and Dark Angel and I'm sure other ones, those are just what I saw/remember now -- Killjoys was in that era but I never saw it because we no longer had cable. Dark Matter was then too but it got mostly ignored and then killed off. But now, there's a show like Foundation or Ahsoka or Loki S2 and I'm like, damn, look at the women!)
(sorry for rambling all over yr comments,
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Date: 2023-10-11 11:37 am (UTC)I'd also add Central Park and Schmigadoon, at least for fans of musical theater.
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Date: 2023-10-11 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-12 08:50 am (UTC)Similarly for Foundation, I need to go back and start over!
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Date: 2023-10-12 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-19 05:22 am (UTC)I think I'll pick up Silo and Foundation. I'd watched the first ep of silo and enjoyed it. I really should continue.
I did bounce off Mythic Quest--the humiliation humour made me go "NOPE I CAN'T" but if it gets better, I may pick it up again.
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Date: 2023-11-09 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-15 03:45 pm (UTC)The other CW I'd put is severe psychological abuse/torture regarding the company's, uh, "disciplinary procedures"? I feel like I must be forgetting something, but those are the major ones.
I really love this show, the central conceit is a striking metaphor that you can do a lot with, and I also love the production design! It's retrofuturistic specifically drawing on aesthetics of the late 70s-early 80s, which is an era I just personally really like the look of, and it adds to the atmosphere of mystery and disorientation. And the writing is great too of course, Mark's relationship with his sister is sweet and believable in a way I don't always feel with sibling relationships in movies and TV. I'm super excited for season 2!