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 was surprised to hear recently how poorly AppleTV+ is doing. I suspect it’s a branding issue more than a content issue with people possibly thinking you have to own an Apple device to watch.
For me AppleTV+ has the highest Hit to Miss ratio of all the services. Check out Silo, Slow Horses, and For All Mankind as some of my favorites you didn’t mention.
It pisses me off that I can download the app to watch on my fire stick (a reskinned android device) but not on my android phone. I even tried using the APK for the fire stick and it won’t fucking work. If they want to gain viewers, maybe don’t alienate 43% of the market.
I don’t really know anything about android; does this not work?:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.atve.androidtv.appletv&hl=en-US&pli=1
It does not. That’s just for tv boxes, won’t work on phones and tablets.
Huh - that is a pretty big hole.
It kinda blows my mind that Apple are talking about selling rights to shows to Amazon Prime because their service is performing poorly and yet they don’t even have an Android app…
Yep! Same thing I’ve been saying. You can use the mobile browser, but that’s a pain in the ass, trying to use the controls meant for laptops and desktops on a tiny screen, plus if you pause and to to something else for w minute it refreshes the page half the time. Very frustrating. I mean, I do, when there’s something I want to watch (Ted lasso, mainly), but yeah, PITA, and I don’t understand why they do it, when nearly half of all mobile users in the US are on Android. There’s no way it’s an oversight, it’s either a legal thing or a slight, like when Amazon wouldn’t allow YouTube apps
Silo and Slow Horses are amazing. I need to watch more of For All Mankind before I form a proper opinion on it, but it seems good.