April 22, 2022, 8:01 a.m.
It's not TV, it's TV+
"Severance" makes a good case for Apple taking HBO's role in the streaming era.
Good Screen
Hello. Back in 2013, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings declared that, fresh off the acclaimed first season of House of Cards, his company’s goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us”. It was a bold bet; Hastings saw streaming as the future for the kind of buzzy, critically-acclaimed content that had made HBO a household name. The next Game of Thrones, so the thinking went, would be on Netflix, not a premium cable network.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and the first thing Netflix thinks I’ll love is its new original series Is It Cake?, a reality baking competition it’s keen to tell me is “based on a popular meme”. Also recommended: The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, yet another Netflix reality dating format which dares to call itself a groundbreaking social experiment. My fiancé’s recently been glued to Old Enough!, an imported Japanese show in which literal toddlers are tasked with going out to the shop and picking up some things on their own, a premise that gives me anxiety before I even watch a single minute.
It’s safe to say, then, that Netflix hasn’t so much become the next HBO so much as it’s become the next Sky, or the next basic cable: a hugely popular pay TV service that dazzles you with choice, only to leave you aimlessly thumbing through its library when you’ve finished something everyone else has said is good. So if Netflix is just what we watch by default now, what’s the real next HBO?
Right now, it’s probably Apple TV+. Apple’s decision to join the streaming wars in 2019 was pretty nakedly profit-driven; Tim Cook had been talking up new ways to make money from services as iPhone sales inevitably plateau. But when you have literally hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on whatever you want, it turns out you can make some pretty fantastic TV.
Ted Lasso is perhaps the service’s best-known original; the show is a football comedy without being about football, and it manages to successfully blend an earnest wholesomeness with honest conversations about mental health and masculinity in a way that’s refreshing for a show of its kind. It’s also home to CODA, the story of a Child of Deaf Adults who has a passion for singing that won Best Picture at the Oscars.
That being said, I don’t think there’s anything that puts TV+ in for contention of being the heir to HBO as much as Severance. It’s a dark, dystopic thriller about a group of people who’ve surgically split their personalities between their home life and their work life, working for a megacorporation with a cult-like reverence for its founder (and yes, the irony of this being on Apple TV+ is not beyond me). Its premise is a fun thought about our own work-life balances, backed up by incredible production design, an stellar cast, and a surprising amount of humour.
It’s the kind of show that makes you okay with splashing out for another streaming service, much in the same way people paid a premium for HBO. In a world of streamers with Is It Cake?, that’s a pretty nice thing to have around.
Good Content
Listen: Wet Leg’s self-titled debut album is a corker, a quarter-life-crisis made flesh with earworms like Chaise Longue. Ur Mum has been stuck in my head this week, if you’ll pardon the strangeness of that sentence.
Also, while I’m here, I wouldn’t have really got stuck into Wet Leg without BBC Radio 6 Music, which is particularly solid with Craig Charles at the helm in the early afternoon. My friend Cory (hi Cory!) and I have been texting each other trying to guess the year in his Time Machine feature a few times this week.
Read: Heartstopper, Alice Oseman’s extremely wholesome webcomic/graphic novel about two boys (and their very queer friends) navigating being teens and their feelings for each other, is about to hit a hiatus — which means it’s as good a time as any to start reading it. Oh, and funnily enough, its Netflix adaptation came out the day this post wound up in inboxes.
I’ll see you soon, either to talk about Eurovision (yes, the hour is near) or to go completely off course and talk about something that isn’t screen-based #content at all. Have a good one in the meantime!
