Week-to-Week: 10 Bucks for Buccaneers is a hard sell for Apple TV+
On streaming price increases and the burden they place on perfectly cromulent programming
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When your streaming service costs $5 a month, it doesn’t really matter what it includes. Sure, that’s not nothing, but there’s such low stakes to subscribing for a month that there doesn’t need to be a clearly formed identity. It just needs to have a reason to subscribe, and after that customers will either connect with it or not.
This changes as the price rises, though. Every streaming service is increasing their prices right now, and let’s make it very clear: this has nothing to do with the resolution of the WGA Strike, or the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, and everything to do with the industrial conditions that created those strikes. The film and television industry’s embrace of the streaming business model has objectively failed even as the companies themselves continue to be profitable, and the only recourse for companies like Disney or Netflix is to make fewer shows and either charge us more for them or force us to shift to ad-supported plans that diversify the revenue streams involved and keep shareholders happy.
Personally, I’m in a position to accept those price hikes for Netflix and Disney+ (through the Hulu/ESPN+ bundle), given that this is my job (both academically and critically). However, I don’t think I’m alone in saying that there’s something different about Apple’s recent announcement that their Apple TV+ streaming service will be increasing to $10 a month. Part of it is how quickly the service’s price has changed: it was only $5 a month as recently as last October, but last year’s jump to $6.99 was only in place for a year before Apple decided it wasn’t enough.
But beyond the sticker shock of it all, $10 a month is what most of us were paying for Netflix streaming in a moment circa 2015 when it felt like Netflix was seemingly (although not really) streaming everything, and making dozens of original series that were all getting second seasons. And so to pay the same for a streaming service with almost no library content and fairly sporadic releases seems especially difficult to justify for most users.
Now, as friend of the newsletter Julia Alexander went into for Puck, Apple’s game here has less to do with their entertainment business and more their business strategy surrounding their Apple One subscription service, where they hope people like me who are paying for cloud storage and Apple TV+ will eventually decide to give them slightly more money to add News and abandon our Spotify subscriptions. But as much as that might be true, it doesn’t change the value proposition Apple is creating for standalone customers when compared to their competitors.
The result is a $5 streaming service that didn’t need to have an identity becoming a $10 streaming service in desperate need of one.
Now, let’s be clear: there’s lots of great content on Apple TV+. We’ve covered much of it here at Episodic Medium (Schimagdoon, The Afterparty, Mythic Quest, Severance, Shrinking, Ted Lasso), given that they remain one of the last bastions of weekly episodic releases. And when you have a friend or family member ask you what they should watch, I do often find that Apple’s glossy, high profile shows are a pretty safe bet—something like The Morning Show may be divisive, but it’s also incredibly familiar, and even if the buzz has faded something like Lessons in Chemistry fits into the same conversation. And after initially catching the first half of the season in screeners, my boyfriend and I recently ambled through the back half of the Seth Rogen/Rose Byrne comedy Platonic and found it to be a charming diversion.
However, I don’t know if throwing money at movie stars to make TV shows is really a $10 a month strategy. The truth is that Apple lost its “singular” show in Ted Lasso, and as the price increases and competition mounts, even good shows like For All Mankind (which returns for season four on Friday alongside my reviews) or Slow Horses (which returns at the end of November) aren’t really carrying the value necessary to sell a streaming service with this little content. Returning shows are a way to keep those of us who are already in the ecosystem subscribed, and might even work for people who get Apple’s free trials with new devices and just never get around to canceling it. But to truly compete at this price point, Apple needs to set itself apart, and none of what they’ve launched beyond Ted Lasso to date from a TV perspective has really cracked that code—Severance will eventually return, but even it’s not a $10 a month show at day’s end.
It seems unfair to place this burden on a show like The Buccaneers, which debuts tomorrow. The Buccaneers stands as an example of an Apple series that lacks the big stars we often see among their casts, and which has a premise that seems too…familiar. There’s just no way to think about the series without considering it Apple’s response to Bridgerton’s success—it’s not a direct copy, but it’s trafficking in the same navigation of aristocratic norms, and I suppose the most cynical read is that they looked at the success of Ted Lasso and wanted another transatlantic story that would play in both the U.S. and the U.K. Based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel, the series tracks daughters of new money American families who trade the disdain from old money of New York for the turned-up noses of British high society in their search for belonging. And like in Bridgerton, the adaptation explores modern cultural issues in a period setting, as issues of race and queerness emerge as this younger generation pushes against the boundaries of their parents’ world (which is not quite as artificially utopian in its openness to these issues as Bridgerton’s, but it’s still a bit of a fantasy).
It’s not that there’s nothing to recommend in The Buccaneers. The first three episodes, which debut tomorrow, showcase the expected lush period details and a strong central performance from Kristine Froseth, who I enjoyed a lot in Looking for Alaska and The Society. And while I don’t know if I fully understand some of the choices the show is making in mapping out the central love triangle between Froseth’s Nan and two competing love interests, it is distinct from Bridgerton’s hyper-focus on a single love story, creating greater uncertainty over the story’s direction. It also remains encouraging to see Josie Totah finding her place in Hollywood following her transition, as the show anchors itself in the female perspective on this world from a diverse range of perspectives. And while I’m probably partial to the Bridgerton approach of string quartet covers of pop songs, I can’t lie and say I didn’t appreciate the thematically apt “Nothing New (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” needle drop.
But I left those three episodes realizing that Apple TV+’s recent price increase has created a higher burden for each show they debut: The Buccaneers is a fine extension of their lineup, but in the absence of a library there is just more pressure on original series to deliver something monumental and groundbreaking, fair or not. And while it’s probably not a bad strategy to draft off of the success of other streaming shows, and technically Apple TV+ remains $13 cheaper than my current Netflix plan, there’s just a limit to what a clone can do at this price point.
Could Monarch: Legacy of Monsters—which arrives next week—be a different beast? It’s a big-budget franchise push, extending Legendary’s Monsterverse, and it’s certainly an example of Apple showing off its willingness to spend money on Godzilla and the other MUTOs. And given its weekly releases, Apple is in a position to try to compete with Disney’s franchise-focused TV projects. But while the convergence of the Monsterverse has been happening across the Godzilla and Kong projects, I don’t think any of them have demonstrated a strong cultural resonance despite solid box office results, and nothing about Monarch feels like it’s going to break through the zeitgeist in a way that will make this appointment television. Or more importantly, there’s nothing in the two episodes I’ve seen that is going to take this from “I like the idea of this show and will subscribe for a month or two” to “this service has an irreplaceable place in my streaming diet based on what they’re releasing.”
And again, Apple doesn’t really mind this: this is a value-add to their larger ecosystem, and they aren’t as concerned about return on investment as some of the legacy media companies are. However, when we reach the $10 price point, none of that matters from a consumer perspective. As combined streaming budgets approach traditional cable costs, that extra $10 is going to be a breaking point, and there’s a matter of principle at stake with regards to what we’ll pay for access to streaming programming.
And so if there’s more existentialism in the struggles of services like Peacock or Paramount in a climate where Disney and Netflix have a degree of “too big to fail,” from a consumer level there is at least an accepted conception of value in those companies’ libraries that Apple simply doesn’t have access to. It’s also happening at a time when Netflix, the default streaming service still, is actually increasing its library options thanks to legacy media streaming services trying to diversify revenue streams amid the streaming contraction.
The result is a streaming service with a collection of good to great shows that finds itself pricing itself into a place where it becomes harder to recommend, and where each new show faces an uphill battle with consumers’ shifting relationship with the streaming ecosystem.
Episodic Observations
Remember when Apple first started making new shows and it was announced that they would all be PG-13? It’s such a fascinating monument to what they thought the streaming service would be, and how quickly they realized that it would lose them access to a huge swath of creatives.
Speaking personally, the idea of switching from Spotify to Apple Music is heresy (I’d lose my playlist history!), and so really they’re never going to pull me into the larger Apple One system, given that I didn’t really get much out of my recent Apple Arcade trial.
Christina Hendricks is the biggest “name” in The Buccaneers, but because the show has decided to hand-wave away the logistics and time required to travel across the Atlantic circa the 1870s to personally spite me, she isn’t around a whole lot in the three episodes that debut tomorrow.
I don’t think the Monarch embargo has lifted, so I won’t say too much more on that until next week, but my plan right now is to do some Discussion posts where I write a paragraph or two. I can’t really justify adding to the freelance budget, and I won’t have time for full reviews myself, but I’m really curious how people end up responding to it.
I threw on a few episodes of the new NBC procedural The Irrational recently, and I found them pretty effective—Jesse L. Martin is a great presence, and the setup is basically House, insofar as our protagonist has grad students who handle B- or C-stories while he’s in the midst of the Case of the Week. There’s even a serial element tied to his past trauma, in this case a fire that left him with significant burns. I admittedly half-watched some of the episodes I saw, but at a time when broadcast is mostly dark, a comfortable presence.
If you’re interested in discussing the Gen V finale, or any other subject, a reminder that paid subscribers can start threads in the Substack Chat, and that even free subscribers can respond to those conversations. I know we’d talked about starting more discussions for more shows, but my instinct is always to led these be reader-led efforts, and no one’s really jumped up to discuss things like The Morning Show or Lessons in Chemistry on a weekly basis.
I won't violate the MONARCH embargo either, though I am curious to hear what other people thought of it. Let me explain why:
When I write my monthly streaming preview columns for the NYT, I typically only watch the first episode of the shows I'm spotlighting, because: 1. My write-ups for these shows are only about 125-150 words long and are very pointedly not reviews (due to embargoes), so I really just need to see enough to write an informed description; and 2. I write 15 of these spotlight capsules and only have about a week between getting screeners and filing the columns, so I can't really spare the time to watch more than one episode. There are two exceptions to this policy (if you can even call it a "policy"): 1. When the first episode grabs me so hard that I *have* to watch more, immediately; and 2. When I get to the end of the first episode and I still don't really know enough about the show to write about it. (This happens distressingly often these days).
So, what I can say about MONARCH is that I watched two episodes. For which of the above two reasons? I'll leave that a mystery for now.
(I watched just one episode of THE BUCCANEERS. It was fine. I'm not planning to watch more.)
I honestly think Apple TV is somewhat underrated. It's true that it doesn't have library content but I view that as a strength. Because Apple is right now the only streaming service where you have nothing BUT Original Series. And based on my viewing experience, most of them are good-to-great! Like, Apple from the outset had a higher median quality than other platforms.
Moreover, the absence of other archival content actually makes it easier to pick and choose stuff to watch. Does it justify the larger price tag? I don't know. But I'm good for sticking with ATV+ for now.
It helps that you can actually download ATV+ series onto your hard drive.