I had a sci-fi summer. I read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, because the film came out, then his The Martian, followed by Cixin Liu’s trilogy of novels that begins with The Three-Body Problem (the second season of the Netflix adaptation of which is coming soon, incidentally, and—boy—are they going to have some problems telling the rest of that bonkers story). Then I went in search of sci-fi on screen. Part of it, I think, is that I’ve been craving plot. There’s a tweet from some years ago on the subject of the dragging pace of television these days that I often think about, which observes that, once upon a time, if there was a TV show called Surf Dracula, you’d see him surfing every week, but in the streaming era the whole first season is a flashback to how he got his surfboard. In sci-fi shows, by contrast and as a general rule, things happen.
I noticed that all the appealing stuff seemed to be on Apple TV+. There’s Foundation, a sprawling space epic based on the Isaac Asimov stories; Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s happy-clappy dystopia; Severance, probably last year’s most talked-about show; For All Mankind, an alternate history of the space race in which the Soviets got to the moon first; and its arguably even better spin-off, Star City, which tells the same story from the Soviet perspective. Next year will see Apple TV+ release an adaptation of William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, starring bland hunk du jour Callum Turner, otherwise known as Mr Dua Lipa. Is all its sci-fi good? No. Silo, in particular, I have found disappointing—too much portentous reference to “the before times”. But overall, Apple TV+ is where the good, prestige sci-fi is right now. It’s not only sci-fi on the platform, of course, but it does make up a core part of its original programming.
It’s a smart move by Apple. There are a lot of die-hard sci-fi fans out there, and therefore a huge potential audience. But I think sci-fi is having a mainstream moment, too. Everything Everywhere All at Once was, in essence, a sci-fi movie, and people went wild for that in 2022. And there may also have been some crossover from the big franchises like Star Wars, which have made people more open to other sci-fi offerings that they might otherwise not have countenanced. It’s also a strategy that Apple TV+ is particularly well placed to execute. To do sci-fi well, you need big budgets, and Apple has inconceivably huge amounts of money at its disposal.
It’s also got me thinking about the character of the other streamers. We’re a few years out now from the mad proliferation of new platforms. In 2019 there was the launch of Disney+, as well as Apple TV+; Paramount+ reached the UK in 2022; and Now TV includes the HBO content from that network’s own service, HBO Max. When this all began happening, my first reaction was to think: there’s no way I’m subscribing to all that. Now, with the exception of Paramount+, which is so buggy it’s nearly unusable, I do indeed subscribe to all that.
Now, I feel more able to generalise about the various streaming platforms
In the beginning, there wasn’t much sense of what each platform was for, exactly, other than serving up tons of entertainment so as many people as possible would pay the fees. Now, I feel more able to generalise. Disney+, for instance, as one friend put it to me recently, has some good stuff, but there is something faintly embarrassing about being a subscriber, perhaps a vestige of the idea that it’s a platform for children’s films, even though it isn’t just bright colours and franchises. When I turn on Netflix now, I do so expecting something to fill the time, but probably not something excellent. It’s quantity over quality there; constantly updating lists of poorly lit, competent but unexciting shows that disappear from your memory as soon as the credits roll.
The other thing Netflix does, which Apple TV+ doesn’t, mostly, is merrily cancel shows mid-run. I didn’t start watching For All Mankind until this year, during its fifth season. To be able to experience five seasons of a (to me) new, high-quality show on the platform, makes me think as a paying customer: what other delights are waiting here? Whereas when I go on Netflix, my feeling is: what are you going to try to make me waste my time on today?
Apple TV+ still has a lingering problem, in that it feels like nobody is really talking about its programmes, with the notable exceptions of Severance and Slow Horses. But if it keeps on turning out fine shows, particularly in a rich and popular genre like sci-fi, and Netflix keeps pursuing numbers through slop, that may well change.
