Since the streaming wars began, each service took on their own flavour.
HBO - generally decent, prestige television, but has less “content” than other services
Netflix - Quantity over Quality, you get gems sometimes, but also a lot of junk to sort through
Disney+ - A lot of good legacy content and very hit and miss with marvel/disney IPs, fans are willing to complain/ hate watch
So here’s the thing with Apple TV, I didn’t subscribe to it, I bought an apple product and got 3 months free, and the discourse is either love it or just silence. No one seems to ‘hate’ the shows.
The Good - Ted Lasso, Severance were the ones I really enjoyed, Ted Lasso felt genuine, especially with the British sensibilities and I will compare this to Shrinking later, Severance was good and hopefully doesn’t have the mystery box problems
The Mid - Shrinking is from Bill Lawrence who created one of my favourite shows Scrubs, but it’s just super boring, I finished Netflix’s Man on the Inside in a single sitting but couldnt continue Shrinking, compared to Ted Lasso, it also feels fake nice, fake chill.
The Ugly - Foundation is probably one of the worst written sci fi on television now. People hated on ST: Picard very vocally and for Foundation I only found a couple of youtube videos on how bad S1 is.
It’s bad in a way that is not really related to the books, but having the name makes it slightly worse. The writing is basically equivalent to one of the bad Doctor Who episodes but with 10x the budget. You get occasional bursts of brilliance which basically comes out of Asimov’s ideas. However, its extremely hard to point this out and TV fans will defend this, this is not the case with SW shows on Disney plus where people understand the difference between fan service and bad writing. It’s pretty hard to find an opinion on Apple TV shows that says “It’s OK, I didn’t like it” which happens so frequently on Netflix.
I’m not sure why thats the reason, just my observation and wondering if you guys have any opinions on this phenomenon
I don’t think there are outright BAD shows on the platform. Which is a nice change of pace from Netflix, especially.
On the topic of Ted Lasso, I actually am of the opposite opinion. I think by the third season, that show felt so forced I started to kind of dislike it. And now they want to raise its corpse from the dead for a season 4.
Shrinking, on the other hand, has moments where it feels a little fake, but overall everything feels better to me. This season that just started up has been good.
One show I couldn’t get into AT ALL was See. The premise was just dumb, and the writing wasn’t great. There’s a big battle of blind people on a foresty hill in the first episode where nothing would have gone the way it did. I don’t care how well you have adapted to not seeing, you aren’t battling on a hill blind, with blades and boulders falling down everywhere.