Pandora's Box, page 27
Apple TV+ confirmed its reputation as the happy streamer with a Best Picture Oscar for CODA, which The New York Times lead critics accurately described as a “pedestrian heart-tugger” and explained its win over The Power of the Dog, a much better picture, as “sentimentality triumphing over craft.”42 Or, as Vulture put it, “In a time of crisis, the Academy was in need of a fuzzy blanket, and CODA just so happened to be expertly knitted from baby-alpaca wool.”43
The two shows were yet another indication of the return of comfort viewing, which had never really gone away. Will we get a steady diet of more of the same? Apple TV+ scored in the feel-good wars by picking up the smarmy Cha Cha Real Smooth at the 2022 Sundance Festival, which most critics liked but whose young male lead and director was called “a slobbering puppy” by the one prominent reviewer.44 Even the Duffer brothers, auteurs of the very uncomfortable Netflix hit Stranger Things, cite comfort viewing as one of their goals, “where heart wins out over cynicism.”45
It’s easy to see the appeal of comfort viewing in troubled times, lulling audiences into an early bedtime so they can sleep through pandemics, the Russian assault on Ukraine, the ever-present specter of nuclear war, the Supreme Court, the Big Lie, and climate change, etc. After all, one of the primary appeals of movies used to be escapism with its obligatory happy endings.
An irony too evident to ignore is that many of the most popular shows on Netflix, theoretically a disrupter, have always been network standards: The Great British Baking Show, not to mention Friends and The Office. Their appeal suggests the limits of innovation. Several reviewers compared the 2021 Emmy nominations—Ted Lasso and inoffensive comedies like the Netflix hit Emily in Paris, an insipidly charming fish-out-of-water trifle created by Darren Star of Sex and the City fame, long on scenic Paris, and short on skirts that The LA Times compared to “a giant bowl of mac and cheese.”46
Apple TV+ would never run a discomfort viewing show like Dahmer, no matter how big a hit it is on Netflix, but the good news is that the streamer is slowly moving beyond the shadow cast by Friday Night Lights. One of the smart things it did was to drill down into the conflict in the Middle East, airing either originals, as in the case of a little Palestinian gem called Huda’s Salon, a feel-bad, no-way-out movie, or remaking large-scale Israeli series, a la Showtime’s Homeland, in this case Tehran, as well as Keshet’s False Flag, aka Suspicion, and Mark Boal’s Echo 3, co-produced by Keshet and Apple.
Best of all is its crackling spy thriller, Slow Horses, about a clutch of deplorables guilty of crimes against their employer, MI5, that can’t fire them but can’t use them, either, and puts them out to pasture in Slough House, headed by Gary Oldman, as an older, even more curdled George Smiley, whom he played in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in 2011.
One hangover from the past that was too big to ignore was HBO’s unfinished World War II trilogy, produced by Spielberg and Hanks. According to one source, at the 2010 Emmys where The Pacific cleaned up, “Plepler literally walked up to Tom and Steven, and said something like ‘How quickly can you get me another one?’”47 Hanks, accompanied by Spielberg, came back to HBO with Masters of the Air, a saga of aerial combat over Europe, with an initial price tag in the $200 to $350 million range.
Masters of the Air tells the story of the “Mighty Eighth,” the strategic bomber group comprised of B-17s and B-24s that carried out daring (and virtually suicidal) daylight raids over German-held territories in preparation for D-Day.
During the negotiations, however, AT&T bought HBO, and Plepler’s yes became AT&T’s no. Enter Apple, for which this was small change. At a meeting with Spielberg and Hanks, Apple TV+’s Van Amburg and Erlicht, as if unable to believe their good fortune, were so starstruck that reportedly they were nothing short of obsequious, saying yes to everything the producers asked for. Apple snapped it up, with Van Amburg or Erlicht quipping, “Do you take Apple Pay?”
What Hanks didn’t know, says a source, was that Apple’s process was totally different from HBO’s. If Hanks was effectively the showrunner on Band of Brothers and The Pacific, there was no one on Masters of the Air, or rather, there were too many. The writers, Graham Yost and John Orloff, each understood he was going to be the showrunner. So, in a sense, did Morgan Wandell, late of Amazon and now Apple’s head of international content development, who seemed to be calling the shots. One source close to the production called him “the worst executive I have ever met. He gave notes on every single page of script, and didn’t understand things unless they were spelled out in dialogue, over, and over, and over.”
According to the source, Wandell brought in Cary Joji Fukunaga, with whom Apple had an overall deal, and treated him as if he were the showrunner. It became “a shit show,” in the words of one participant. Wandell “decided that he wanted to make the Cary Fukunaga World War II show, not the Tom Hanks–Steven Spielberg World War II show.”48
Apple apparently considered Fukunaga a “BFD” (“big fucking deal”) because he was credited with the success of the first season of True Detective and the most recent Bond movie, No Time to Die. But he had a reputation for being difficult. “I honestly thought he was one of the most arrogant A-holes I ever encountered in my career,” says Kevin Reilly, who worked with him once. He added, “There’s Ryan Murphy difficult and Fukunaga difficult. Guys like Fukunaga get on a pedestal and say, ‘It can’t be done like that. I’d be compromising my artistic integrity.’ With Murphy, it’s ultimately going to get done.”
Fukunaga was already under a cloud for alleged inappropriate behavior toward several actresses. Raeden Greer says he tried to get her to appear topless in the first season of True Detective despite being assured that she would not have to appear nude. She refused, and was fired from the series.49
According to a lengthy exposé in Rolling Stone, prior to Masters of the Air, “Nearly a dozen sources say the No Time to Die director repeatedly crossed professional lines, using his sets to openly pursue much younger female cast and crew members.”50 Fukunaga denies these accounts.
In any event, according to one source, Fukunaga knew little about World War II, but began to rewrite the scripts anyway, introducing new characters and scenes, saying “I want this to be Top Gun,” which was anathema to the writers.51
Hanks, who did know World War II by virtue of producing Band of Brothers and The Pacific, appeared to wash his hands of the whole thing.
Hanks’s absence created a black hole in the center of the series. Graham Yost was slated to write Episode 4. When Fukunaga asked, “Who’s in charge here?” he replied, “That’s a good question.” Years later, Yost recalls, “That was part of the weird thing about Masters. It was always difficult to figure out who had the last say. Some days it was [Hanks’s producing partner] Gary Goetzman, but then it’s also people at Apple, but there’s no real showrunner.”52
When Yost started writing Episode 4, Fukunaga began giving him notes and wanted to rewrite it entirely, says a source: “Cary wouldn’t do anything Graham said, and in fact thought Graham worked for him.”53 That episode “was very near and dear to my heart,” Yost says. “I’ll take notes from anyone, but I’m a showrunner, and I’m too old to be rewritten. Then I was rewritten, and I said, ‘I’m out.’”54 He quit.
Most or all of the last six episodes were said to be run by Fukunaga. Production started in February 2021. He was still shooting inserts for Episode 1 in January 2022. According to one source, “This is going to be at least $35 million an episode. And they are only forty, forty-five minutes long.”55 Moreover, there was pressure to divide the ninth and final episode in half to make ten episodes in total, to bring the average per-episode cost down. Otherwise, the actual cost was going to make the executives look bad, and it might encourage future Apple showrunners to demand the same budgets. Finally, many of those involved in the production threw up their hands and started calling the show, “Masters of Despair.” The good news, however, is that the aerial sequences look spectacular.
As the folks at The Ankler point out, Apple seems less interested in franchises and tentpoles than in relationships with prestige A-list talent. The days when Netflix boasted about financing the highly touted “passion projects” of legendary filmmakers—like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which is said to have cost in the neighborhood of $175 million—are over, at least for Netflix, where they are now known as “vanity projects.” Netflix sat on the sidelines while Apple TV+ paid Scorsese a salary in the neighborhood of $20 million to direct his latest love, Killers of the Flower Moon, for $200 million, which came in with a bloated runtime of three hours and twenty-six minutes. Apple also bought Scorsese Flower Moon author David Grann’s next book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, with Plepler producing, to be followed by another Scorsese movie, this one on the Grateful Dead. It also dropped another $200 million on Brad Pitt’s Formula 1 movie without a script or finalized deal details.
An inventory of the names in lights who have gotten first look and/or overall deals from Apple TV+ reads like Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, starting with Scorsese, Adam McKay, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, Idris Elba, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Stewart, Alfonso Cuarón, Ridley Scott, and on and on. Let’s not forget Tom Hanks, whose Apple TV+ show Greyhound was a disappointment, but the franchise here is Hanks, not his movie, and Apple is gifting him with another shot—Greyhound 2.
It used to be said that strengthening Apple TV+ with the current team in place looked more problematic than buying a rival streamer with a deep library.56 Van Amburg and Erlicht may nevertheless manage what none have done before, emerge from Slough House to rejoin Regents Park. Its 2023 slate is impressive, not the least of which is its coup in signing Vince Gilligan, who still owed them for picking up Breaking Bad, for a two-season straight-to-series order, at somewhere around $13.5 to $15 million per episode.
Still, despite its starry deals, Apple TV+ only has about 30 million subscribers, less than half of Netflix’s domestic number. It doesn’t matter. Explains Steven Soderbergh, “Apple and Amazon are distorting the ecosystem because they don’t need their streaming business to make money. They can make bad deals and just hold everybody’s head underwater until they drown.”57
Having lost its key executives—Price and Lewis, as well as Hope and Berney—it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse for Amazon Studios, but they did. No sooner had the fourth season of Transparent ended in September 2017 than star Jeffrey Tambor was accused of sexual harassment.
Tambor’s accusers were two trans women: a former assistant, Van Barnes, and co-star Trace Lysette.
Lysette, who went on to star in the trans drama Monica, alleged that in a scene where she and Tambor were both wearing pajamas, “My back was against the wall in a corner as Jeffrey approached me. He came in close, put his bare feet on top of mine so I could not move, leaned his body against me and began quick, discreet thrusts back and forth against my body. I felt his penis on my hip through his thin pajamas, and I pushed him off of me.”58
Tambor denied that he had behaved inappropriately, asserting, “I have never been a predator—ever.”59 He expected no more than a slap on the wrist, and was shocked when Amazon opened an investigation and Soloway fired him, proving, maybe, that you can’t bring a cis male to a trans party. He was the lead character.
For Soloway, it was a disaster, the end of the show. A ruptured aortic aneurism resolved the plot problem, and Transparent bled out in 2019. What was supposed to have been the fifth season instead became a single two-hour musical aired on September 27, 2019.
The barrage of bad news coming from Amazon Studios created such a dark cloud of malaise that even creatives working for the studio wondered if it would ever be able to find anyone to replace Price. Amy Sherman-Palladino, coming off the first season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, said, “It was almost like, ‘Who on earth wants that horrible job?’”60
Sherman-Palladino was wrong. Apparently determined to erase Amazon’s reputation as a playground for abusive white males, it bowed in the direction of #MeToo and selected a woman—but gone were the days when she could have come from one of the successful indie companies. Instead, blond, fifty-five-year-old Jennifer Salke came from NBC Entertainment. She was the smart choice, if by smart Amazon meant a safe and conservative executive with a track record of hits like Glee at Fox, and This Is Us, Modern Family, and The Good Place at NBC. She accepted the post in February 2018. Sounding like Soloway and their producer, Andrea Sperling, Salke said all the right things: “Years ago, people would say that you need a white male star, that women should be sexy,” she observed. “We turned off generations of viewers; it didn’t feel relevant to them.”61 However, she also said, “We’re not going for something small and niche.”62 Says Ted Hope, “Salke’s is the opposite of the approach that Roy had,” continuing, “Roy was looking for things that would stand out as unique. And she’s looking for the big shows and movies.”63
First on her list was bringing in the holy grail, that is, a Game of Thrones–killer. Hers was The Rings of Power, its source material being the appendices of Lord of the Rings, said to be a personal obsession of Bezos’s. It was not as crazy as it sounded, because in them Tolkien laid out a prehistory of the Rings trilogy. The rights alone cost about $250 million, while the production costs of the first season have been estimated at $400 million. Adding on the marketing expenses, we arrive at an obscene number flirting with $1 billion for the first season.
The Rings of Power premiered in September of 2022. Amazon’s claim of 25 million viewers defies independent verification, and eventually a cone of silence has descended over the figure, suggesting it was disappointing. It grabbed headlines despite multiple questions about how many minutes constitutes a “view,” as Todd A. Kessler points out, but the other question was quality. As The New York Times’ Jeremy Egner wrote of the George R. R. Martin series, “World-changing events erupt from recognizable human impulses and flaws . . . jealousy, lust, insecurity . . .”64 Amazon’s Rings of Power, on the other hand, gave us a slow, talky, humorless clash of empty abstractions, as did The Wheel of Time, with its Dark One, the One Power, the True Source, etc., etc., its previous attempt at world-building.
The Rings of Power is at its best a showcase for special effects, particular the spectacular destruction of the Southlands in Episode 6, so shocking that it brings to mind uncomfortable comparisons to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Beyond that, dialogue—if you can call it that—is customarily delivered in ponderous speeches alternating with fortune cookie homilies.
Salke also bet $300 million–plus of Amazon’s pots and pans on its six-episode spy thriller set in the Citadel universe, with segments semi-independently produced in countries all over the world. It is so ambitious that the trades refer to it as a “global event . . . the second most expensive show ever produced,”65 after Rings of Power. Citadel scored no more than 51 percent with reviewers, and TV Guide dismissed it as “offensively dull.”66 Domestically, only 37 percent of those who started it persevered to the end. (Comparatively speaking, Netflix canceled Resident Evil, which had a 45 percent completion rate.) Never accused of not knowing a bad thing when she saw it, Amazon is in for another season. In other words, while Amazon may reserve its old “prestige lane” for quality product, to use Salke’s metaphor, chances are that it will become no more than a footpath choked by a tangle of roots and weeds. Amazon signed one of those prestige talents, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, coming off Season 2 of Fleabag in 2019, to a $20 million a year three-year deal that came to nothing, but was renewed anyway.
The one thing Rings of Power had going for it was that it was rich in intellectual property (IP), in this case the preexisting audience for The Lord of the Rings. As the competition among the streamers heated up, IP became more and more important. Lionsgate’s Kevin Beggs elaborates on the irresistible lure of the built-in audiences delivered by preexisting underlying material: “In a world of many platforms and five hundred shows, an original breaking through is incredibly hard, so finding some marketing edge, some previously recognized fan base, is hugely important. If you’re a buyer, a graphic novel, sales figures for a bestseller, or a sensational podcast that you can put in front of upper management where you can say, ‘Look at this thing!’ makes it easier to rationalize the buy.”67
Moreover, IP is, of course, another version of comfort viewing, warm and fuzzy, continuing familiar story arcs with the same characters, plus new ones who are no more than variations on the old ones. Or, alternatively, aged (or de-aged) stars like Sly Stallone in Tulsa King who make older audiences feel right at home.
Movies and TV show festooned with IP include bestselling books like Warner’s Harry Potters; Starz’s Outlander or HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, of course, as well as video games, like HBO’s The Last of Us; comics (DC and Marvel); a buffet of notorious crimes and scandals; as well as headline-grabbing true stories like HBO’s White House Plumbers, and finally, live events and sports.
One easy way of extending IP is through sequels, prequels, and reboots—that is, franchises. In 2019, the last prepandemic year, Franchise Entertainment Research reported that franchises comprised 42 percent of new wide releases and 83 percent of global box office.68 Showtime gave us Dexter: New Blood in 2021 and American Gigolo, based on the 1980 film. Even FX is getting into IP business with a sequel of sorts to Justified, called Justified: City Primeval, with Tim Olyphant reprising Raylan Givens in Detroit; Vince Gilligan capitalized on Breaking Bad with Better Call Saul. Apple TV+ is prepping a Prince of Tides reboot, and there are many, many more in the works.
Amazon bought itself $8.45 billion worth of IP when it purchased MGM Studios for twice as much as it was valued in May 2021, acquiring its four-thousand-film library as well as the United Artists library that MGM owned. Bezos’s stated aim was to exploit MGM’s “vast, deep catalogue of much beloved intellectual property,” and he planned to “reimagine and develop that IP for the 21st century.”69
