Longtime Apple content chief Eddy Cue told a SXSW crowd on Sunday that Apple TV+ doesn’t make as many TV shows and movies as its competitors for the same reason that the tech giant doesn’t make as many hardware products as some competitors.
Cue, Apple’s senior VP of services and a 36-year company veteran, took the stage at the festival in Austin, Texas with Ben Stiller, executive producer and director of Apple TV+’s buzzy drama “Severance,” for a conversation that veered into the state of Apple’s business, the fate of Showtime and deep into details of the “Severance” origin story as the series awaits its Season 2 finale dropping on March 21.
“When you do something that’s great, it should resonate with a lot of people — and hopefully everyone. And so when we think about our shows and we think about our products, we’re not designing them for a small subset of people. We design them for everyone. We realize we may not get everyone to watch or everyone to use our products, but we think of them in that way,” Cue said during the 42-minute conversation with Stiller.
“Again, if you focus on doing a few things, you might get something right. And I think that the show has done that in spades. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the show capture the imagination. I was in Singapore last week, and when I was talking to people that knew I was involved with TV+, this is the first thing that comes up,” Cue said.
Stiller acknowledged that Cue and the programming team at Apple TV+ have a hard job in breaking new TV series and movies in such a crowded entertainment environment.
“In this day and age, it’s so hard to have something that breaks through, and that you can actually get people to watch and to see, because there’s so much,” Stiller observed. “I mean, our generation — we’re about same age — it was different. You go to the movies — the movies were the thing when we were kids, and television was television — but there wasn’t all this other stuff out there. And I’m curious how you deal with that, as someone who is running Apple TV and music. There are all these different elements that are grabbing people’s attention. How do you actually get a conglomerate of people who actually are paying attention to the thing you’re making, because there’s so many good things out there? It’s just hard to get people’s attention.”
Cue emphasized the importance of curation in Apple’s ethos of offering premium products in all that they do.
“Part of what we’ve said is we’re betting everything on the shows that we’re doing, because we’re not going to throw 20 shows up against the wall and hope that one sticks. The ones that we do, they all need to stick, otherwise we have nothing else,” Cue said. “And I think that pressure is a good thing, because it makes you be better.”
Cue praised “Severance” as the rare example of a show that drives cultural conversation week to week. He noted that Apple sees the high level of fan engagement around podcasts and YouTube content devoted to analyzing each episode.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a show like this, where it’s captured so many people’s imagination and the culture and the audience,” Cue said. “This reminds me of shows back in the days when television — you tune in on a particular night and everybody was so excited all week to get to the next episode. And that’s what this is like.”
Among other topics addressed by Cue and Stiller:
Stiller cut right to the chase with the Apple senior leader: “How is Apple doing? Because sometimes I worry. Are you guys doing OK?” he asked Cue. “It’s a competitive world, which is great, but we’re doing all right,” Cue responded. “We’re OK. We’re, like you, trying to try to be our best and create new things that people really love.” To which Stiller replied, “OK, good.”
While discussing his past work for Showtime, Stiller went off on a tangent asking about the fate of the pay TV service. “Do they exist? asked Stiller, who directed the 2018 Showtime miniseries “Escape at Dannemora.” Cue was ready with an answer. “They do. They’re part of Paramount+.”
Stiller credited Apple TV+ leaders Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht for supporting his vision that Adam Scott play the lead role of Mark S. in “Severance” even when they didn’t see it themselves as first. Cue and Stiller reminisced how the show was one of the first that was greenlighted for Apple TV+ back in 2019. Scott was in Stiller’s mind as they brought the pilot script by Dan Erickson to life.
“Adam Scott was always in my mind to play Mark,” Stiller said. “It wasn’t that [Van Amburg and Erlicht] weren’t big fans of Adam’s, but they just saw [the role] differently. And Apple TV+ was just starting out. And I said, ‘Well, all right, we can explore some other ideas,’ which we did. But then ultimately, I said, ‘I really think Adam would be the guy’ and they were really open to it. And then he did a reading, and they were like, ‘Yeah, he’s the guy.’ That to me was the beginning of this creative process that was like, OK it’s going to be a real back and forth and also a trusting of who you’re working with.”
(Disclosure: Variety and SXSW share a common owner in PMC.)
