The Apple TV+ Launch Survey: Is The New Streaming Service Worth Your Time And Money?

A couple of years ago, when Apple's new streaming service had been announced without many of the details, The Morning Show was one of the biggest deals they could brag about. Here was a show about American TV journalism, inspired by the book Top of the Morning, by cable and print journalist Brian Stelter, with some pretty high-wattage stars: Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell would all be among the leads of the program, with the ensemble filled out with Mark Duplass, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nestor Carbonell, Billy Crudup, and more. Apple ordered two seasons instantly. From all accounts, though, The Morning Show has had a rocky road to completion. That "couple of years ago" reference above unfortunately means this show was greenlit before men like Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose were slammed with serious and disturbing sexual-assault allegations. A show about modern TV news couldn't ignore these facts, and what eventually became The Morning Show fully slid into the #MeToo era. The setup of the pilot episode is that the popular daytime show that serves as the drama's title is rocked when one of its anchors, Mitch Kessler (Carell), is accused by multiple women of sexual abuse, and his co-anchor Alex Levy (Aniston) has to weather the storm on and off the air after Mitch is subsequently fired.Though the show is purportedly a work of fiction, it's not...y'know, that hard to imagine who might serve as inspiration for this logline. Separately, The Morning Show follows cable-news journalist Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon), who inadvertently goes viral after she berates a coal-mine protester during one of her remote shots. Jackson is invited onto The Morning Show, in a contentious interview with Levy that inspires the network's news head (Crudup) to shake things up further.The Morning Show could easily work, if it knew what it wanted to be. The pilot, unfortunately, doesn't have a clue. The show was created by Jay Carson, but Carson left the program before it began airing, and its new showrunner, Kerry Ehrin, gets a "Developed by" credit. Both are credited with the script. Though there are a few bright spots in the opening hour, specifically a very oily Crudup as well as Aniston channeling the flighty energy of Rachel Green into a more seriously frustrated heroine, there is also a lot of yelling. A lot. It's not that these characters might have bad reasons to be angry, but more often than not, the shouting feels performative and false. (Alex, when watching Bradley's viral video, comments that Bradley must have known she was being filmed, right after we hear Bradley shriek that she's exhausted of the fighting.)It would also be helpful if this show about how journalists cover the news had a firm grasp of what its characters think about the news. During the climactic interview between Bradley and Alex, the latter seemingly chides the former for becoming the story. Yet the real problem is that Bradley's own opinions (and arguably the show's) are hollow and wishy-washy; when given the chance to clarify which side of the coal-mine protest she falls on, Bradley says, "The human side." The little hope I hold for future episodes of The Morning Show is that eventually, someone will figure out how to make such an A-List cast and easy premise work. One thing that would be helpful, and I do want it to improve, would be better writing. To call this pilot Sorkin-lite in its rat-a-tat-style dialogue and walk-and-talk energy would be an insult to "lite". But for a pilot episode putting its best foot forward, this show struggles to say anything profound or timely, even as the era of public male figures being put through the ringer continues apace.

One of the intended draws of Apple TV+ is that its shows are, like many successful recent small-screen shows, big and bold. They are small-screen stories that feel much bigger in every way. This quartet of newbies are not low-budget affairs, either because of cast salaries or because of the stories' respective scopes. Take, for example, See. Though the show doesn't boast the most famous cast, it's meant to have the epic sweep and style of major Hollywood blockbusters. All eight of the episodes in the first season are directed by Francis Lawrence, who helmed a number of the Hunger Games films, and the lead is Aquaman himself, Jason Momoa.So why is it that See is irretrievably silly? Part of the issue is the premise. Set centuries in the future, See focuses on the few survivors of a world-destroying virus; those survivors now live in various tribes around the world, and they are also all blind. In fact, they're so blind that the very notion of vision is perceived as heretical, and anyone who talks of it is considered a witch. In the pilot (written, as will be the case for each episode, by Steven Knight, writer and director of Serenity), a pregnant woman gives birth to twins while her husband (Momoa), the leader of their tribe, attempts to head off an attack from emissaries of the mysterious Queen (Sylvia Hoeks). It turns out that the pregnant woman is a recent entry to Momoa's tribe, and the father of her children is one of those heretics talking about the power of sight. So the entire tribe is marked for death, and they wind up on the run to protect themselves and the newborns, who might somehow be able to see.What works for See is its sense of narrative drive. Of the three hourlong series Apple TV+ is premiering on November 1, See has the clearest idea of the kind of dark adventure it's telling. That said adventure is awfully silly is its own problem, but against The Morning Show and even the largely intriguing For All Mankind, it was nice to watch a pilot that felt like a coherent first chapter to a pulpy sci-fi novel. Momoa, whose big breakout role was on Game of Thrones, is well suited to playing the brawny and gruff Baba Voss, too. And Lawrence's capability of rendering the wilderness of Northern Canada (where the show was filmed) creates some impressive imagery.But See cannot escape its inherent goofiness, with Knight sometimes leaning into that goofiness. (When we first meet the Queen, she is praying while achieving some kind of orgasm, because of course she is.) It often comes down to character names, like the aforementioned Baba Voss, or the unseen heretic father of the twins, named Jerlamerel. Credit to the actors on this program who have to say that name without bursting into a fit of giggles. The balance of this very dumb idea with a lot of faux-profound pronouncements and stultifying dialogue, too, doesn't help this show out at all. After the pilot, I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious where this show is going. But See might land as the kind of fun hate-watch that Knight's Serenity has become since it arrived in theaters earlier in 2019. It might be bad, but the kind of bad that's enjoyable to suffer through.

I'm a curious sort, so I'm going to try out the second episodes of each of these four series. But in truth, there are just two shows with second episodes I genuinely want to see: Dickinson and For All Mankind. Each of these shows offer enough promise for what could come next in their respective stories, and I genuinely want them to succeed. But the problem Apple TV+ is likely going to have at the start is simple: none of these shows are appointment viewing, and since they are basically the entire offering on opening day, that's bad. Hopefully some of the programs here will get better, just as it'll be nice if upcoming Apple TV+ shows — such as M. Night Shyamalan's Servant and the podcast-drama Truth Be Told, arriving in December — kick things off on a surer foot than these shows have. But first impressions are important, and these shows make, at best, a very mixed sort.