Spent a chunk of the weekend messing around with Apple TV+, which showed up on my phone and TV Sunday morning without me really asking for it. Turns out I got a free year bundled in when I bought my phone back in September, and I'd genuinely forgotten that was a thing until the app just appeared on the home screen. Thanks, I guess.
The lineup at launch is small, eight or nine shows depending how you count the kids' stuff, but really only a couple felt like appointment viewing: The Morning Show, See, For All Mankind, and Dickinson. Compare that to opening Netflix where you can scroll for twenty minutes and still not land on anything, and this feels almost quaint.
I watched the pilot of For All Mankind first because the premise grabbed me: what if the Soviets land on the moon first and the space race never winds down. Ronald D. Moore (the Battlestar Galactica guy) is behind it, and you can feel that DNA in there, lots of NASA process detail, a slow burn instead of an action spectacle. The first episode is honestly more table-setting than anything, but I liked it enough to queue up episode two for tonight.
The Morning Show I bounced off. Not because Aniston and Witherspoon aren't good, they clearly are, it's more that the whole thing feels like it was assembled by a committee with a huge budget and no idea what to do with it yet. Gorgeous sets, prestige-drama lighting, and dialogue that keeps explaining things I'd already understood two scenes earlier. I'll give it one more episode before I decide it's not for me.
the app naming situation is a mess
Small complaint, but it bugs me: Apple now has an Apple TV (the box), an Apple TV app (the interface), and Apple TV+ (the subscription), all living under one name on one remote. I had to explain to my roommate three separate times which one I meant. This is a naming decision made by people who don't have to use their own product on a Tuesday night when they're tired and just want to watch something.
And now I'm up to six streaming subscriptions, counting music separately, which I do because Spotify and Apple Music are not the same bill. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, Apple TV+, and Disney+ lands in a week or so whether I want it or not. My old cable bill, the one I canceled two years ago feeling very smug about it, wasn't that much more than what I'm paying across all of these now. Nobody wants to hear that, but it's true, and I felt it when I actually added up the receipts this morning instead of just complaining vaguely about it like I usually do.
Unrelated, but also from this week: Google announced it's buying Fitbit for something like $2.1 billion. I wear a Fitbit Charge every day, mostly to count steps and lie to myself about how much I walk, and my first reaction wasn't about the hardware at all. It was wondering how long before all that heart rate and sleep data ends up feeding whatever Google actually wants to build with it. Maybe nothing changes. Maybe it does. I'll believe the "we won't sell your health data" line when I see the actual policy and not the press release.
Anyway. Back to For All Mankind tonight, and probably one more shot at The Morning Show before I give up on it entirely. If anyone reading this has opinions on See, the Jason Momoa blind-future show, let me know, because the trailer alone left me confused about what genre it's even trying to be.