The March 2019 Apple event announced 3 things:
Apple Card
a credit card with no fees and the sort of spending tracking that a dozen other apps offer. It’s a partnership with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard.
Apple Arcade
a paid subscription service (price not announced) that gives you an all-you-can-eat style access to a list of premium and paid games on the app store.
Apple News+
a subscription service for digital versions of newspapers and magazines.
and…
The Big Announcement!: An unexciting mainstream version of what is already available to consumers with no advantageous features or innovation
Apple TV+
The main attraction! And what is it?… It’s an app.
It contains Apple Channels which does what Amazon Channels service and Hulu both do. But now its by Apple!
In addition to the ability to buy channels through Apple, there will also be original programming at a subscription price that was conspicuously absent from the event… Whatever that price is, will it be worth it? Here’s what we were given to make that determination:
The Original Programming on the debut of Apple TV+ is a snooze-fest
The shows in this announcement are nothing special. That doesn’t mean any of them will be bad – it just means they’re not exciting.
Stephen Spielberg’s Amazing Stories… basically another Twilight Zone style anthology “but with SPIELBERG!”…
The Morning Show… A Comedy(?) or Drama(?) or Both about a Morning Show… Reese Witherspoon & Jennifer Aniston & Steve Carell do a show about a morning talk show. No clues as to what kind of show it is except the painfully unfunny “oh, hey guys, am I late??” bit that ushered in Steve Carell to the presentation stage after Aniston and Witherspoon had said a few words about their involvement in the series. That clue suggests that the show is a comedy but who the hell knows. There was no detail about it. We don’t know if this is going to be a goofy reboot along the lines of Back To You (a show that barely lasted 1 season, literally no one knows about, and I’m only mentioning here because I kindasorta almost got a speaking role on it) or if they are going for more of an Alan Sorkin tone like HBO’s The Newsroom. Probably the latter, but only because that’s a safer route to take and Apples other lineup items look equally bland and pedestrian.
Something about Immigrants… I guess its a docu-series? The Indian fella from HBO’s Silicon Valley (Kumail Nanjiani) introduced it but what exactly his role in the series is wasn’t made clear. I guess he hosts explorations into immigrant-centric human interest tales or something? Whatever it is – this was the peak of his career as his dramatically lighted face recieved equal billing with Spielberg, Anniston/Witherspoon, Big Bird, and frigginOprah, so good for him at least even if the show looks uninteresting.
A Sesame Street Spinoff… This segment was so horrible and so indicative of everything wrong with this event that I had to spin it off into its own post about how awful it was…
A Science Fiction drama about blind people… Jason Mamoa stars in series that is a new spin on the essential concept of “A Quiet Place” in where a tribe of people live in a dystopian future where a handicap is the central driving plot contrivance.
Little Voice… I have no idea what this is but director J.J. Abrams pitched it alongside a singer-songwriter I’m not familiar with named Sara Bareilles. Are you excited yet?
2 Oprah Documentaries… one about sexual harassment, and one about I-already-forgot-cuz-no-one-cares.
Any of these sound like must-see-TV to you?…
The entire Event was among Apple’s most dull ever
Product announcement events for tech companies aren’t expected to be entertainment. Except Apple’s. They decidedly are supposed to be exactly that.
How terribly, painfully, cringe-ily ironic that *this* – an announcement of a video entertainment service – of all Apple’s events, would be it’s most boring.
Chris Evans and Michelle Dockery, who will star in the limited series Defending Jacob, that wasn’t even talked about at the event (or if it was, it was so brief a mention that I didn’t notice), sum up the excitement level of the event perfectly in this GIF:
^That’s at an applause moment, mind you… and they look like they’re at a school assembly having to humor a motivational anti-drugs speaker who is doing zero to change your opinion but you don’t want to make it any more awkward than it already is.
It didn’t need to be like this…
The absolute bone dryness of this event was an unforced error. At Apples 2017 product announcement event, they kicked off with a cold-open presentation of a funny, fast paced, inventive, high-budget comedy sketch depicting how civilization would collapse without any apps. It was legitimately entertaining, fast paced, and took some risks in the places it was willing to go to dredge for comedy in just a short little bit that was exciting and made people want to watch again and show other people who didn’t see it.
That event announced the new/upcoming iPhone X, an Apple Watch with cellular connectivity, and the Apple TV box finally getting 4K capability.
So… if Apple kicked off a presentation of routine hardware upgrades with a such a high-end, high-concept, pizazzy video, you can only imagine what kind of epic excitement stirrer they cooked up for an event that announces their streaming Hollywood style video service… except you can’t imagine it… because you would never in a hundred thousand years guess that this trillion dollar company entering the entertainment video space would ever ever ever make such a bizarrely wooden, nerdy, socially awkward, WTF choice of an opening for such a release…
This Apple event opened with… I kid you not… a slideshow… (which is bad enough, but hold on – it gets so much worse) that led a discussion of CEO Tim Cook lecturing about what a “Service” is… conceptually, and philosophically….
Apple… What. The Motherkking. Fkk. AreYouDoing??