Why you might not be watching the best show on Apple TV+.

On By Littum

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One of the best TV shows returns this week. You probably haven’t seen it because it runs on a small platform powered by a potential disruptor that hasn’t been able to dent a field dominated by giants.

That’s right: It’s Apple TV+, and on Friday it’s bringing it back Resignation for another season. The sci-fi thriller from creator Dan Erickson is a great piece of television, one of those triumphs of world-building that has you shivering and running to Reddit to read theories as soon as an episode ends. Resignation debuted in 2022 and is only now returning after significant production delays. It follows workers at a mega-corporation who undergo a procedure that separates their work memories from their personal ones, and it gets really weird. The new season, most of which I have seen, is a worthy follow-up to the first.

Resignation is not alone among strong Apple TV+ sci-fi or strong Apple TV+ programs in general. For my $9.99, this service is an indispensable streamer these days, the port not only for Resignation but to Slow horses, For all mankindand a handful of others. No platform has a better ratio of things I watch to things I finish – and actually enjoy – than this one.

I am in the minority. While its parent company may have ambitions for the service that are more complex than winning the streaming wars, it’s clear that Apple TV+ is losing them in a lopsided way. According to Nielsen data, well under 1 percent of all TV screen time in the US is spent on Apple TV+ in a given month. (About 0.3 percent is typical. YouTube, the king, is over 10 percent, while Netflix is ​​around 8 percent, Prime Video 4 percent and Hulu 3 percent.) Apple TV+ is so far down the list of streamers by viewing time that Nielsen refers to it as “other streaming.” ” category of a pie chart.

It’s strange. Apple is the most ubiquitous company, with a theoretical billboard for its streaming service sitting in most of our pockets at all times. Yet Apple can’t get a bite out of the streaming public, apparently no matter how much money they spend on any number of quality shows. I’ve decided that Apple TV+’s problems are the result of a strange thing to say about an Apple product: the service is just a little too pure for this world.

Apple has never released subscriber numbers for its streamer. That number might not be bright anyway, because the company has given away lots of subscriptions. If you’ve bought certain Apple products in the last few years, you’ve got a few free months of Apple TV+. If your favorite baseball team had a game on Apple TV+, you could get a few free months of Apple TV+ to watch that one game. (You could even do this if you were a former subscriber who had taken a break.) If you did nothing at all but were at home the first weekend of the year, you could at least get Apple TV+ for free for a few days.

Freebies aren’t the only idea Apple has tried to get more people onto the service. It also followed the same strategy as most of its potential competitors. Live sports are perhaps the easiest way for a large company to get subscribers for a streamer. (See Peacock’s use of NFL playoffs and BEER.) Apple hasn’t gotten any properties this big, and one of its bigger bids, that for the Pac-12, did not succeed. Weekly Major League Baseball games last year didn’t lift it out of the viewership basement. Apple’s partnership with Major League Soccer, which now puts every game on a special paywall product in Apple TV+, has been pretty good for MLSall things considered. Still, Apple TV+ continues to languish at the bottom of the pecking order.

Aside from its sports portfolio, Apple TV+ has an excellent selection of shows. A few have caught cultural fire, most of all Ted Lassoa sports sitcom with a heavy dose of mental health drama. The morning show have done well enough enter the top 10 most watched streaming programs. Siloa post-apocalyptic drama about people living in an underground tube, has made some big numbers. So hair Shrinksa kind of dark comedy about mental health that a star and writer (Brett Goldstein) share Lasso. These shows have each cost many millions of dollars, all with impeccable sets and production value. They also have huge stars anchoring them: some Harrison Ford here, some Jennifer Aniston there, some Jason Sudeikis or Reese Witherspoon there. In a vacuum, you’d think they’d all be blockbusters. Still, Apple TV+ in raw viewership numbers continues to soar.

No one will ever feel bad for Apple, which is less an edgy, independent manufacturer and more the most powerful company in the world trying to grab a piece of the streaming ecosystem to pad its reputation or, one day, its margins . Being part of the most gargantuan of tech giants has sometimes limited the good work Apple TV+ has done. Tim Cook reportedly intervened to stop a show on the death of Gawker, a website that insulted him personally. Jon Stewart’s latest talk show ended because it it was not edible for him to talk freely about geopolitics on a service run by a company that sells lots of iPhones in China.

But let’s assume the American public doesn’t pass on Apple TV+ because of a principled objection to Big Tech’s control of storytelling. Apparently everyone has an idea why the service hasn’t caught on more. If there was a single answer to the question of why more people aren’t watching, Apple, sitting atop a multibillion-dollar cash pile, would have found it by now.

The service barely has a library. You can scroll through all of Apple TV’s few hundred shows and movies in seconds. Most tech media have assumed that this small library is a disadvantageand I’m sure they’re right: Apple just doesn’t have an endless pile of titles to algorithmically dump users into as soon as they finish what they’re watching. But I’ve been quite happy with the platform’s small selection because it spares me the paralysis of endless choices that drown me on Netflix.

Other factors abound. Apple TV+ doesn’t get nearly the marketing push that Apple’s hardware gets, that’s a difference attracted the attention of entertainment journalists. Of the service shows are great, but you may have noticed the lack of any discussion in this history of feature films. That’s because Apple’s foray into movies has been somewhere between “fine” and “commercially and critically disastrous.” as when spy movies Argyll bombed in 2024. Then there is the simple question of price. Apple TV+ is competitive at $9.99 a month, especially for a service that remains (at least for now) ad-free. But $9.99 is more than the old $4.99 and $6.99and no streamer is immune to people releasing as it jacks up the price.

If the company in question here wasn’t literally Apple, this streaming service would be a likeable player. I lack a streamer that doesn’t confuse me with a deluge of titles I never want to watch and algorithmically shuffles me from one to the next faster than I can see what’s happening. I lack a streamer who doesn’t mind spending tens of millions of dollars on untested properties rather than rebooting intellectual property. (Hollywood’s economy could use it.) I lack a streamer that isn’t entirely tied to reality programming as a cheap way to keep eyeballs. It may all be too much to ask in the long run, but for now I’ll settle for something more modest. I want enough people to see Resignation that I can have a proper group chat about it before some cost cutter in Cupertino asks what’s going on on.