By rights, Masters of the Air, which begins airing next week, should probably be considered the TV event of the year. Why? Let us count the ways: it’s the follow-up to giant second world war epics Band of Brothers and The Pacific, two jewels in TV’s golden age crown that expanded the reach, ambition and budgets of prestige television (and, along with 24, arguably ushered in the TV box set age to boot); it’s produced by no less than Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks; it costs an estimated $250m – not quite Lord of the Rings money, but way beyond the balance sheets of most modern TV shows – and looks like it; it’s long-awaited, having been on development slates since 2012; and it stars a planet-straddlingly famous actor in Austin Butler, alongside a deep bench of next-generation A-listers (Barry Keoghan, Callum Turner, Ncuti Gatwa, Bel Powley).
Case closed, then. Except – can the TV event of the year be the TV event of the year when you’re not sure whether anyone will actually watch it? Because Masters of the Air is on Apple TV+, a streamer that still remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a lovely Jony Ive-designed smartphone shell.
Is anyone watching Apple TV+? It really is very hard to tell. While other streaming companies, notably Netflix, are beginning to tentatively share viewing data, Apple remains stingy with its own figures: the best we get are vague percentages – viewership up 42% year on year in 2023; Slow Horses viewership up 65% from its first to second seasons, and so forth. That paints a picture of unalloyed success, but, without knowing if we’re talking about thousands or millions of viewers, it’s not terribly illuminating. (Independent estimates put Apple’s subscriber base in the tens of millions range, compared with hundreds of millions for Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon.)
In the absence of hard data, we’re left to intuit Apple TV+’s popularity on the woolly concept of buzz. Are people you know, in person or online, talking about Apple’s shows? Are they being discussed around whatever the 2024 remote-working equivalent of the water-cooler is? Well, erm, sort of. Slow Horses certainly seems to have attracted a robust audience, based on the many excitable X (formerly Twitter) posts and Reddit threads I saw over Christmas. The Morning Show seems to get more talked-about the more unhinged it gets (it’s one of the few Apple shows to crack ratings tracker Nielsen’s streaming top 10). Hijack definitely caused a minor splash when it was released in the summer. And it’s hard to question the impact Ted Lasso had over lockdown.
For those hits though, there are dozens of shows – and we’re talking expensive, star-led shows – that came and went with barely a batsqueak of buzz. Did you, or anyone you know, watch Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes in gothic mystery The Essex Serpent? Or Nicole Kidman, Issa Rae and Cynthia Erivo in feminist dark comedy anthology series Roar? Or Extrapolations, another anthology series, this time about the climate crisis, that featured a cast list so long and starry that I would use up the rest of my word count in relaying it here? I’m guessing that the vast majority of you didn’t. Apple tosses out a lot of shows into the great black expanse of streaming, and a worrying amount seem to drift away into nothingness like George Clooney in Gravity.
That’s a shame because, in pure quality terms, Apple has a decent claim to be the best streamer out there at the moment. After a rocky start, where their MO seemed to be in hideously earnest, deathly dull celeb-fronted documentaries, they’ve grown into a place where talented – and yes, often famous – people are given money and space to realise wild ambitions (similar to what Netflix had in mind before they became obsessed with mid-market mush). That approach doesn’t always work, but when it does the results are pretty spectacular – see Severance and Pachinko, both of which are hopefully returning this year. What’s really impressive is, in an age where so much TV seems governed by algorithms and taste-clusters, is how varied and risk-embracing Apple’s commissions are. It’s a platform where a clunking great Godzilla action epic sits next to a brain-dissolvingly weird Lakeith Stanfield psychological horror series, and where the longest-running show is an alternative history series about Russia winning the space race, and America colonising Mars.
So what, you might ask – if Apple TV+ are making good shows, does it really matter if not that many people are tuning in for them? No one really watched Mad Men at the time, for example, and that has hardly harmed its legacy. And Apple have notoriously deep pockets – why not let the trillion-dollar company splash a fraction of its fortune on delicious gourmet television? Yes but the flip-side of that is that it’s hard to shake the idea, even five years into its existence, that Apple TV+ is a frippery, an indulgence, something its rich parent company might eventually get bored of. It’s not Netflix, where streaming is the entire business. It’s not even Prime Video, which at least is bundled as a selling point in Amazon’s wider Prime membership. (You are given three months of Apple TV+ when you buy a new iPhone, iPad, TV or Mac – but after that you’ll have to pay.) It’s still hard to know what Apple really wants from Apple TV+: to conquer streaming? To burnish their brand? To build relationships with celebs and get them to sell phones? Who knows!
Perhaps Apple TV+’s purpose will become clearer by the end of spring. Because this looks set to be a big few months for the streamer. As well as Masters of the Air there’s Dior biopic series The New Look, starring Juliette Binoche, Maisie Williams and John Malkovich, a giant sci-fi drama starring Noomi Rapace, a new Kristen Wiig and Laura Dern comedy and Noel Fielding playing Dick Turpin. That’s not to mention the already released (and very much worth watching) Criminal Record with Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi, and – on the film side – the one-two punch of Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon, two awards-garlanded movies that you can currently only see on the platform.
Maybe all that lot will be enough to propel Apple TV+ into the same stratosphere as Netflix, Disney+ and co? Or maybe it won’t, and we’ll be back here again in a few months, wondering what the deal is with this very good, barely watched streaming service.
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