andstyles to appeal to every users’
individual tastes.
Until now, Apple TV+ has been
defined mainly by big stars and big
spending, such as the reported $
million per episode Apple paid for
Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell and
Reese Witherspoon to star in “The
Morning Show,” a drama about a
network news program in crisis.
Ms. Aniston stars as a famous
news anchor fighting for her ca-
reer amid entrenched sexism and a
#MeToo scandal. “Dickinson,” a
comedic portrait of Emily Dickin-
son using today’s slang and music
and starring Hailee Steinfeld, casts
the poet as a disrupter.
The fantasy series “See,” starring
Jason Momoa, takes place in a fu-
ture where humans have adapted to
centuries of blindness and earth’s
ecology has repaired itself.
“See” creator Steven Knight
didn’t write the show’s initial
scripts with Apple in mind. But af-
ter the company bought the series,
which had a reported budget of
$15 million per episode, “It was
self-evident from the beginning
that there was a shared ethos,”
Mr. Knight says. While promoting
“See,” some producers tried to
draw a connection between an Ap-
ple show in which characters with-
out sight fight fiercely and trek
through the wilderness, and thecompany’s efforts to make technol-
ogy accessible to visually impaired
users. “Our community is a big fan
of Apple products,” says “See”
blindness consultant Joseph St-
rechay, “and they’re not paying me
to say that.”
As a trillion-dollar company re-
nowned for product design, Ap-
ple’s immediate risk isn’t to its
bottom line, but in extending its
brand to the inherently hit-or-miss
business of making TV shows and
movies.
The company scrapped a TV
drama titled “Bastards” when it
was still in the script phase. The
story about Vietnam War veterans
who respond to grief and resent-
ment with violence had been set to
feature Richard Gere. Apple’s TV
chiefs say they dropped the proj-
ect due to a lack of “shared vision”
and other behind-the-scenes fac-
tors, not a broader avoidance of
shows with explicit violence or
sex, as has been reported.
They note that “Bastards” was
adapted from an existing Israeli
series. “We would not have bought
that show if we felt that there
wasn’t a version we would have
been proud to put on our service,”
says Mr. Erlicht, a former presi-
dent of the Sony Pictures Televi-
sion studio with Mr. Van Amburg,
where they oversaw such series as“Breaking Bad.”
Viewers can access the TV app
via Apple devices or smart TVs
and other third-party players that
support it, such as Roku and Ama-
zon Fire. Though cheaper than
other major streaming services at
$4.99 a month, Apple TV+ faces a
bigger challenge in introducing it-
self than other platforms from es-
tablished entertainment brands.
Disney+ will launch Nov. 12 on a
foundation of family-friendly en-
tertainment, franchises such as
“Star Wars” and Marvel, and over
eight decades of movies and tele-
vision from Disney studios.
And unlike other streamers, Ap-
ple hasn’t populated its platform
with a library of movies and TV
shows licensed from outside
sources. It will feature only the
company’s own original movies
and TV shows, including a book-
club series featuring author inter-
views by Ms. Winfrey.
Apple’s TV app is also designed
as a portal to content from outside
providers, including HBO (but not
Netflix). The small number of orig-
inals available at launch creates
pressure to represent Apple’s TV
identity, executives acknowledge,
turning that issue into a dig at ri-
vals like Netflix.
“When you’re not hiding behind
lots of volume or lots of this andAppleTV+’s ‘For All
Mankind’ is an
alternate history of
the space race.APPLE(5)“F
orAll Mankind” is
more than just
one of the expen-
sive inaugural
shows on Apple’s
streaming TV service. The debut of
the space-race drama doubles as a
high-stakes product rollout.
In this alternate history, Soviet
cosmonauts reach the moon first
in 1969. To avoid falling further
behind, the U.S. fast-tracks female
astronauts and tackles missions
NASA never attempted in real life,
such as extracting ice from a moon
crater.
Dystopias dominate the sci-fi
genre, but “For All Mankind” has
an unusually rose-tinted premise.
And its themes of science and in-
novation are on-brand for the tech
giant with its name on the series.
Apple’s slogan for its first-ever
slate of TV shows: “Stories to
Believe In.”
Apple didn’t reach this launch
date without some drama of its
own. For two years,
news and rumors
circulated about
projects the com-
pany was pursuing
(or rejecting) as its
new programming
executives shopped
Hollywood for shows
of HBO-level quality
and budgets.
It was a different
matter conveying to
potential subscribers
what entertainment
from the maker of
iPhones, MacBook
laptops and $250 AirPods would
stand for. At a March event at the
Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino,
Calif., Apple executives brought
many celebrity actors and produc-
ers to the stage—from Oprah Win-
frey to Big Bird—but scant footage
from the shows they had made.
Many observers panned the pre-
sentation for emphasizing star
power over substance.
In the weeks before the March
event, Apple executives worked
with the company’s marketing
team to distill the many projects
they’d been developing into a uni-
fying theme. “What is all this?
Whatarewetryingtodo?Ifwe
could pull down to one word what
this service is actually about,” says
Zack Van Amburg, who heads
world-wide video with Jamie Er-
licht, recalling the agenda for
those discussions.
By September, the word they had
agreed on—“believe”—was part of
the script for CEO Tim Cook’s next
presentation, where he announced
the price and launch date of Apple
TV+: “Truly stories to believe in,
stories with purpose,” Mr. Cook
said. The line also served as a
hashtag—#StoriesToBelieveIn—and
a marketing theme for the lineup of
Apple originals. This strategy dif-
fers from competitors’ more diffuse
approach to programming. Netflix
intentionally loaded up on original
series that run the gamut of genresBYJOHNJURGENSEN that,you’re saying, this is what
we’re delivering to the world,” Mr.
Van Amburg says.
The stories that will
ultimately define Apple
asaTVpurveyorare
productions that catch
on with viewers. In the
first wave of reviews
published this week,
some TV critics were
unimpressed. Rolling
Stone called “The
Morning Show” a “well-
polished snore,” adding,
“The show, and the ser-
vice, don’t need to ex-
ist, and thus far aren’t
justifying that exis-
tence.”
“For All Mankind”
has drawn some of the
most positive reviews
so far. The idea that led
to the series existed
long before Apple had
designs on the stream-
ing race. When he was
still at Sony, Mr. Van
Amburg had riffed on
the concept for a period drama
about the Skylab era—think “Mad
Men” at NASA—with producer
Ronald D. Moore, whose past
shows include a 2000s reboot of
“Battlestar Galactica.”
Immediately after the Sony stu-
dio heads joined Apple in 2017,
Mr. Van Amburg brought Mr.
Moore in for a meeting, where he
resurfaced the NASA idea. But the
producer later decided that the
history of NASA’s budget cuts and
scaled-back ambitions in the ’70s
was too depressing a backdrop for
a character-driven show. As an al-
ternative, he imagined how NASA
might’ve been forced to prove it-
self in other ways if the Russians
had beaten America to the moon.
“That’s an aspirational idea:
‘Let’s get the space program I al-
ways wanted. Wouldn’t it be better
if this or that happened?’ You’re
starting from a positive premise,”
Mr. Moore says.
That opened up themes more
relevant to 2019 than 1969. Under
pressure, NASA recruits a group of
female candidates for the Apollo
program. A Mexican family who
gathers to watch the Soviet moon
landing on television later steals
across the U.S. border with a
daughter (Olivia Trujillo) who
seems destined for the stars.
Mr. Moore was reminded occa-
sionally of Apple’s role in the pro-
cess when he got word that Cu-
pertino had feedback. Or when
Mr. Cook visited the production in
Los Angeles, where he marveled
over the realism of the Mission
Control set.
“In the day there was such a
thing as an NBC-style comedy and
an ABC-style drama. Those catego-
ries have kind of broken down,”
says Mr. Moore, who says he never
gave much thought in the past to
the brand identity of the TV net-
works that aired his shows. “This
is an interesting match of theme
and corporation that I really ha-
ven’t seen before.”Apple’s Giant Leap Into the Unknown
Thetech giant hopes the idealism in new shows like ‘For All Mankind’ will distinguish Apple TV+ from competitors
Highlightsof the new shows
making their debuts on
Apple TV+: “The Morning Show” (Streams
Nov. 1) Executive producers Jennifer
Aniston and Reese Witherspoon
lead this drama about power strug-
gles at a “Today”-like news show af-
ter a beloved host (Steve Carell)
gets fired for sexual misconduct. “See” (Nov. 1) This fantasy series
presents a world where humans have
adapted to the blindness caused centu-
ries ago by a society-ending virus. Jason
Momoa plays the leader of a tribe in
which twin babies are born with sight. “Servant” (Nov. 28) After the first
wave of Apple originals comes a thriller
produced by M. Night Shyamalan in
which a married couple grieving the
death of a child try to find solace with
an uncannily lifelike doll. “Truth Be Told” (Dec. 6) Executive
producer Octavia Spencer plays a pod-caster who reinvestigates the case
of a man (Aaron Paul) whose con-
viction for murder she played a role
in many years before.ATASTE OF THE FRUITS OF APPLE’S LABOR
THEWALLSTREETJOURNAL. Thursday,October 31 , 2019 |A