Binge Times by Dade Hayes

Author:Dade Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“I Love That Show and I Think You Will Too”

Apple’s product presentations have a familiar, predictable rhythm, not unlike the structure of a Broadway play. The opening act invariably features a short video designed to evoke a warm sentimentality about Apple’s products and their place in our lives. The CEO steps onto an empty stage to rousing applause. Then, products are unveiled in ascending order of importance, building toward the finale, the “one last thing” that the late cofounder Steve Jobs made famous. This event, on September 10, 2019, would be no different.

Details of the Apple TV+ streaming service came within the first fifteen minutes of the nearly two-hour-long presentation at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, wedged between the introduction of a new subscription gaming service, Apple Arcade, and an update of the venerable iPad tablet. The consequential news—namely, the latest iteration of its cash cow the iPhone, the single product that accounts for more than half of the company’s revenues—fell at the end of the event.

Clad simply in a black cardigan and black jeans, Cook took the stage to recap Apple’s grand ambition for its streaming service: to deliver “stories that help you find inspiration, that are grounded in emotion,” he said, hands clasped, preacherlike. “Truly, stories to believe in. Stories with purpose.”

Unlike at the star-studded event six months earlier, Cook served as Apple TV+’s lone pitchman. He touted such premier originals as For All Mankind, an alternate telling of the 1960s space race from Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore; Dickinson, an anachronistic period drama in which a teenage Emily Dickinson, played by Hailee Steinfeld, rebels against her father’s refusal to let her publish her poetry; and The Morning Show, a star-studded drama that, he crowed, Entertainment Weekly had declared “fall’s most anticipated series.”

Cook used the Cupertino stage to screen a trailer for See, a postapocalyptic fantasy starring Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard that takes place in the distant future, after a deadly virus has decimated humankind and left the few who survived blind. “I hope you can get a sense of why I love that show and I think you will too,” said Cook, after screening a two-minute reel that cut between sweeping, mountainous vistas and scenes of a fur-clad primitive society girding for battle.

Apple’s aggressive pricing suggested the seriousness of its ambitions. Apple TV+ would launch in more than one hundred countries on November 1, 2019, and cost $4.99 a month—cheaper than any existing service. Anyone who purchased a new Apple product—iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV—would receive the first year free, Cook said.

“We can’t wait for you to start watching Apple TV+ on November 1 on the Apple TV app across all of your screens. That’s Apple TV+,” said Cook, efficiently dispensing with Hollywood. “Now let’s turn your attention to iPad. . . .”

After the debacle of Apple’s March event, some of Hollywood’s dealmakers had grown cool to Cupertino’s overtures, adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Many expressed skepticism about what the service would look like, how it would be delivered.

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