After all that — the billions spent, the deals with Big Bird, Oprah and Spielberg, the firing of a key producer, the secrecy, the breathless speculation — the moment is here. Apple is ready to take on Netflix, Amazon and Disney in the increasingly crowded entertainment industry.
The tech giant made its formal entry into show business on Monday with a spare-no-expense premiere at Lincoln Center for “The Morning Show,” a program set in the world of morning television starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
At the fountain plaza, the carpet was black, not red. A glowing sign beamed the minimalist logo for Apple TV Plus. Ms. Witherspoon and Ms. Aniston roamed the grounds, along with the Apple chief executive Tim Cook. Invited guests and fans along the rope line captured the scene with their iPhones.
From the stage of David Geffen Hall, Ms. Witherspoon and Ms. Aniston spoke to an audience of 1,500 before the screening.
“Thank you, Apple, for being our partners and trusting in us as your beloved flagship, I guess you would say,” Ms. Aniston said. “Something like that?”
“Yes,” Ms. Witherspoon replied. “It’s the launch.”
Apple TV Plus, which goes live Friday, has been in the works for more than two years. With it, the Silicon Valley giant has shifted its focus from just creating tech products to making content. The streaming service costs $5 a month or comes free for a year with the purchase of a new Apple device.
Led by the veteran Hollywood executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, Apple TV Plus has made deals with Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams and M. Night Shyamalan, among others.
A lot rides on the success of “The Morning Show,” which anchors the company’s first slate of streaming programs and films. Apple paid roughly $240 million for a two-season, 20-episode deal.
“It’s the first time that Apple is entering this business in such a way,” Mr. Van Amburg said in an interview last week.
Now the big question: Will it work?
Asked to describe what will keep their bosses happy, Mr. Erlicht said, “Critically acclaimed quality shows, first and foremost. Ultimately subscribers matter. But Day 1, high-quality, distinctive, critically acclaimed programming will drive everything.”
Well, the early reviews hit the internet this week and they were decidedly mixed.
In addition to “The Morning Show,” several other Apple series have been made available to critics, including: “Dickinson,” starring Hailee Steinfeld as the poet Emily Dickinson; “See,” a fantasy epic starring Jason Momoa that takes place in a future where everyone has gone blind; and a space drama, “For All Mankind,” co-created by Ronald D. Moore.
Apple has gone Hollywood for a reason. With iPhone sales flattening, the company sought out other ways to generate revenue. In addition to Apple TV Plus, it has unveiled a credit card and started a video-game subscription service.
Unlike Facebook and Google’s YouTube, which have tentatively dipped their toes in entertainment, Apple has gone all-in. Within a year, Apple TV Plus could have as much content as longtime cable networks like FX or Showtime.
Apple is going into the business at a time when tech rivals like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have a huge head start in making original streaming fare. Apple will also face vigorous competition from the Walt Disney Company, AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit and NBCUniversal. Disney Plus, offering decades of movies and shows, will be available Nov. 12. NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service and AT&T’s HBO Max will be ready next year.
The next few months will suggest whether or not the executives in Cupertino, Calif., have the stomach for the unpredictable entertainment business. Before Apple TV Plus, the company only flirted with the idea, under Eddy Cue, its senior vice president for internet software and services. In 2017, Mr. Cue hired Mr. Erlicht and Mr. Van Amburg, who were the top executives at Sony’s television studio, as the heads of Apple TV Plus.
“We don’t know anything about making television,” Mr. Cue said last year, by way of explaining why the company had selected the pair, who had helped lead the studio behind “Breaking Bad” and “The Crown.”
There were bumps in the road leading to the black-carpet premiere at Lincoln Center. Until last month, Apple kept some details about its productions under wraps, including plans for how much the streaming service would cost and how it would be marketed.
Corporate secrecy may be the right strategy for selling the latest iPhone, but it rankled some entertainment-business veterans, who were also not impressed with the splashy Apple TV Plus rollout event at the company’s Cupertino headquarters in March.
Mr. Erlicht and Mr. Van Amburg have said little publicly in their 28 months on the job, a departure from how most Hollywood studios engage with the news media.
There has also been the endless litany of questions: How can it survive without a library? How will the shows portray Apple products? Will the content be P.G.-rated, so that it does not sully the Apple brand?
For that last one, there is an answer: No. As the audience saw on Monday night, “The Morning Show” is filled with language that would not make the final cut of a network program. The first episode of “See” features plenty of violence as well as depictions of masturbation and an orgasm. And the first episode of “Dickinson” includes an oral sex scene.
Mr. Van Amburg and Mr. Erlicht said they never intended Apple to be squeaky-clean, but admitted to telling agents and producers that violence, sex or language should not be “gratuitous,” Mr. Van Amburg said.
The use of the word “gratuitous” in those discussions, Mr. Van Amburg added, was “taken to an extreme and suddenly became something and that makes you realize how little people understand what that word means.”
The executive added that Apple would not get in the way of the show creators they now rely on.
“If we were to start to impose certain things like ‘it has to be this’ or ‘it must only do this,’ we would start to pull at a thread of authenticity and potentially be a place that didn’t celebrate — as deeply and emotionally as we do — creative expression,” Mr. Van Amburg said.
Apple will also stream shows for children, including a new animated version of “Peanuts” and programs made with Sesame Workshop.
Apple products do tend to pop up in the new programs, particularly “The Morning Show,” where the iPhone appears so many times that it becomes almost a character in itself. Mr. Erlicht and Mr. Van Amburg have said there was no edict handed down from Cupertino on how the shows treat the iPhone and other Apple devices, a point confirmed by many of the producers.
“Not one person has ever said to us you need to make sure we represent hardware product in our shows or that these shows are a sales tool for hardware product,” Mr. Erlicht said.
Unlike its rivals, Apple will not have the luxury of being able to lean on an extensive library of programming. But Apple customers can use the Apple TV Plus home screen to click to an episode of HBO’s “Succession” or selections from Showtime or Hulu, if they are subscribers to those services.
“For us, it was always going to be about originals and our ability to help you discover all that other library product that exists in the world and exists in all these other places in this disaggregated way,” Mr. Van Amburg said.
Though Apple will soon be streaming, it has not committed to the binge model. For the debut, episodes of “Dickinson” and its children’s shows will be available all at once. The dramas will generally drop a few episodes at the start before easing into a weekly schedule. Apple’s entertainment executives suggested that weekly releases create a consistent buzz in a way that, say, Netflix series do not.
“The Morning Show” is of outsize importance to Apple. Within three days of getting the job at the company in 2017, Mr. Erlicht told the Lincoln Center crowd on Monday night, he found himself in a room at the Creative Artists Agency, hearing the pitch for it.
“We knew right away this was the one,” he said.
Apple TV Plus was so new that the executives had to call Mr. Cue to get instructions on how to obtain cash, Mr. Erlicht said. A hard-fought battle ensued with multiple bidders, including Netflix and Showtime. Not long after a script was submitted, the creator of “The Morning Show,” Jay Carson, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was fired. Hollywood snickered.
“The negotiation was not easy,” Mr. Erlicht said from the Lincoln Center stage. “In fact, I’ll say nothing about the show has been what I would describe as easy. But the great ones never are.”
He did not mention the reviews.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/business/media/apple-tv-plus.html
2019-10-30 09:00:00Z
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