A new article in The Wall Street Journal is outlining’s Apple’s plan for its fancy new streaming service, and everyone is making fun of the tech giant as a result. It sounds moralizing, paternalistic, and as watered down and neutered as TV can be—even compared to CBS. What it’s not, however, is surprising.
Jokes about the iTunes End User License Agreement have been around for almost as long as the media management service itself, but that hasn’t made the 1500-word document any less labyrinthine to the average reader who just wants to listen to some goddamn music. At this point, most of us just accept that the fine print…
Let’s get this out of the way first: We don’t know anything about Apple’s streaming service, including how much it will cost, when it will launch, and what it will be called. It’ll have a bunch of original shows from high-profile creators. It’ll probably have a very clean aesthetic that just works except when it…
YouTube has a far-right problem. The online video platform’s reluctance to actually deal with the wackos, nihilists, and hatemongers in its midst has been widely noted and critiqued, and today YouTube responded with a move that, frankly, has been a long time coming: It finally deleted The Alex Jones Channel. The…
Terry Gilliams’ Time Bandits remains one of the most pleasantly weird movies of its generation (alongside just about everything else Terry Gilliam did in the 1980s), telling a sprawling story about an imaginative little kid who gets sucked into the—honestly, fairly crappy—adventures of a bunch of laid-off low-level…
Way back in February, we reported that Oscar-nominated The Big Sick writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon were developing an anthology series about immigrants called Little America for Apple’s then-mysterious streaming platform. Now, Apple has given the show a series order, officially putting Nanjiani and Gordon…
We feel like we’ve said this a hundred times already, but a big-name content creator has just signed on to the Apple streaming service we still know nothing about. The new addition is Oprah Winfrey, who Variety says is now in a “multi-year content partnership” with Apple to create programs of some kind for this…
According to Deadline, Hailee Steinfeld has signed on to star in Dickinson, a comedy series about Emily Dickinson that takes place in the 1800s but has a “modern sensibility and tone.” The story says Dickinson will follow the now-iconic poet as she uses her “imaginative point of view” to “audaciously” explore “the…
Just in case the lesson from every Black Mirror episode hasn’t sunk in just yet, here it is again: All technology is bad and it will eventually be used to destroy our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Today, that’s coming in the form of imperceptible musical signals that can be used to take control of smart devices…
Isaac Asmiov’s Foundation books form some of the primary texts of modern science fiction, second only to the author’s beloved Robot stories in terms of their lasting appeal. Offering a sprawling but thoughtful look at the rise and fall of empires, the books focus on the “science” of Psychohistory, Asimiov’s made-up…
Apple is collecting talent and funneling money toward its original-TV initiative, but first, they’re out to reclaim the music video. Just a couple weeks after turning an ad for their HomePod into an excuse to let Spike Jonze send FKA Twigs dancing through time and space, the company launched a new music video section,…
Over the last year or so, Apple has attracted some top-notch talent to its growing programming branch. Reese Witherspoon is producing multiple shows, including a comedy starring Kristen Wiig; Damien Chazelle is developing some mysterious new drama; and Oscar nominees Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon sold their…
Apple has just picked up another relatively high-profile TV project for its streaming service, despite the fact—which we’ve pointed out multiple times—that it hasn’t really announced any concrete details about what this streaming service is. We don’t know when it will launch, we don’t know how much it will cost, and…
Spike Jonze has directed some of the best music videos of all time— “Sabotage,” “Buddy Holly,” “Praise You,” “Get Back.” There’s a sort of goofy exuberance to all of them that seems to come from a place of permanent, childlike (but never childish) playfulness. He’s continued to direct music videos over the years, even…
Just as Apple users were getting their heads—and hands—around the iPhone X and its four-digit price tag, there are rumblings that the tech giant is getting ready to announce a new smartphone lineup.
Striving, as ever, to be living on that LeBron James level—regardless of what anybody else thinks about their relative merits—NBA star Kevin Durant has announced that he, too, will now have his own autobiographical TV series. Following in the footsteps of James’ Survivor’s Remorse—which lasted for four seasons on…
Newly-minted Oscar nominees Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani have their pick of projects at this point, and it looks like they’re headed to the small(er) screen. Deadline reports the Big Sick writers are teaming up with SMILF executive producer Lee Eisenberg and Master Of None co-creator Alan Yang on an anthology…
We’re starting to see a pattern, here: TV showrunner Bryan Fuller has stepped away from yet another much-hyped project, announcing today that he’ll no longer serve as a showrunner on Apple’s Amazing Stories reboot. This makes for the third high-profile show that the former Hannibal head has backed out of in the span…
Apple’s iPhone X is an unbelievable marvel of technology with a seemingly endless list of exciting new features and capabilities that will set you back $1,000, which is the kind of detail that overshadows literally everything else about it. Want to get on your phone by scanning your face? Well, it costs $1,000. Want…
We still don’t know much of anything about Apple’s plans for streaming video content, but the company is picking up high-profile shows that we’ll hopefully be able to see somehow at some point. We recently reported that Kristen Wiig had signed on to star in one of Apple’s three projects with Reese Witherspoon, and now …
