TV's best show is a glorious moon shot
It's time to take a space walk...
The last thing I want to do is persuade you to add another TV subscription to your credit card bill. If you’re going to cough up your hard-earned dollars, it should surely be for a Boiler Room sub! But there’s a very good reason to add Apple TV+ to your wish-list right now. It might just contain the best show on TV. Let’s go…
Of all the streaming services, Apple TV+ is the messiest. It’s hard to navigate, difficult to find the shows you want to watch, and struggles to map to your non-Apple devices.
For a company so devoted to creating app-based products, it’s ironic that their own is a clunky mess. It’s a dog of a streaming service. It plain sucks.
I have a reasonably new Samsung smart TV that has Neon, Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. But not Apple TV+. Apple just won’t do it. It’s a shocker.
That means you have to use your Macbook, or, worse, your iPhone, to stream Apple TV+’s content. I doubt any of the big names Apple has sucked into its vortex, like M Night Shyamalan, JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg, want their expensive shows to be viewed on a six-inch screen.
I can see Oprah Winfrey’s disapproving face already.
Apple launched its big-budget streaming service about 18 months ago. Back then, the answer to the questions, “What is this? And what is it trying to do?” was a shrug emoji. It had Muppets and Snoopy and that weird Jennifer Aniston thing and not much else.
It’s still much the same. It’s got a few more shows, but not many of them have hit it big. The Mosquito Coast with Justin Theroux sounds okay. Ted Lasso is supposed to be quite funny. It all just seems like a Tim Cook flex. Apple has the money. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos started a streaming service. Why shouldn’t he do it too?
The platform’s ambition remain hidden. It still doesn’t know if it wants to be the biggest or the best. It just wants to be something. There’s still no back catalogue of bingeable TV shows, no content deals with competitors to fill out its library.
Streaming services live or die by this. It’s why Netflix paid $US100 million for a year of Friends. It’s why NBC launched an entire platform just to offer re-runs of The Office.
So Apple TV+ is a freebie, a bonus you get when you buy a new iPhone. So far, it doesn’t have a Game of Thrones or Mare of Easttown, a show that dominates the conversation, pivots the playing field, and bends the discourse in its direction.
That’s something that might be changing, and it’s all thanks to one show.
For All Mankind launched at the same time as Apple TV+, but got lost amidst all the other shows that landed with it. It’s a space opera, from Ronald D Moore, the guy who rebooted Battlestar Galactica and showed nerds what nirvana looked like.
This isn’t as hard sci-fi, or as nerdy. For All Mankind’s got a simple concept. It re-imagines history. What if Russia beat America to the moon? What if that sparked a nuclear war? Along the way it adds other topics into the mix. What if NASA had more female astronauts? What if we set up colonies on the moon? What if all men grew excellent mustaches?
Does that sound interesting? It should. The show’s second season has been playing out over the past few weeks, and it’s stepped out into a new frontier. Season one was good, but season two blows it all wide open. It’s fantastic television, easily Apple TV+’s best show.
Now that Mare of Easttown has finished, it might be one of the best shows on air full stop. Its cast is fantastic, the premise is excellent, and its scope, which jumps forward a decade every season, means this could run and run.
If you’re planning on queuing it up this weekend, just promise me you won’t watch For All Mankind on your damned iPhone. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but the moon sequences here are among the best I’ve seen. They demand being viewed on a big screen TV, so get your hands on one, because this is a brilliant, beautiful moon shot.
The binge-list: Jeremy Redmore
You may know Jeremy as the lead singer of Midnight Youth, but I know him from way back when we used to work together during Stuff.co.nz’s early days. Right now, he’s all over the place, producing theatre shows, mentoring musicians, and appearing on the new season of Popstars NZ. He’s about to go on tour for his excellent solo album, The Brightest Flame, including an Auckland date at Whammy bar. Check out his website for more details…
My go-to podcast is the expose of musical minds that is Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell's Broken Record. It’s billed as “liner notes for the digital age” and as someone who used to furiously pore over CD booklets, it’s like crack. The show is in its fifth season, but episodes that have stood out above the rest include James Blake, Wyclef Jean, Brandi Carlile, Andre 3000, Tame Impala, Barry Gibb, Serj Tankian and Mike Campbell. It also introduced me to incredible albums from S.G Goodman's Old Time Feeling and Andrew Bird and Jimbo Mathus' These 13.
Speaking of music, spending a whole Sunday listening to an album over and over counts as a binge right? Well that's what I did with Rostam's Half-Light this past Sunday. This is no obscure pick: Rostam Batmanglij is a founding member of Vampire Weekend and has been nominated for three Grammies. It's 52-minutes of perfect, modern indie-pop that effortlessly accompanied an idyllic lazy afternoon in the reading nook of my flat's sunny lounge. The icing on the cake? Rostam has a new album out this Friday…
The book that demanded I sacrifice my Sunday afternoon is the latest novel from Swedish author Fredrik Backman, Anxious People. Backman is well-known for A Man Called Ove, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. Each novel is based on a completely unique premise, drawing you into a compelling plot that seduces you with lightness before kicking you in the guts with dark observations and wisdom. They tackle and contextualise societal flaws you may never have considered and contain at least three moments to make you stop reading as waves of enlightenment wash over you. Anxious People accomplishes these feats.
It was with vast amounts of discomfort that I left Te Pou Theatre after seeing its latest play, Racists Anonymous. Yep, it’s like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting - but for racists. It wasn’t real but it sure as hell felt it. Over 90 minutes, that night's meeting group was confronted and encouraged to discuss such topics as Pākehā who want to be Māori and Was it right to cancel that ex-pat racist brewer who called Māori the scourge of New Zealand? The whole experience was like being part of an immersive art installation and left me overwhelmed with reflections and questions. That’s exactly what good art should do.
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