By rights, Masters of the Air, which begins airing next week, should probably be considered the TV event of the year. Why? Let us count the ways: it's the follow-up to giant second world war epics Band of Brothers and The Pacific, two jewels in TV's golden age crown that expanded the reach, ambition and budgets of prestige television (and, along with 24, arguably ushered in the TV box set age to boot); it's produced by no less than Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks; it costs an estimated $250m not quite Lord of the Rings money, but way beyond the balance sheets of most modern TV shows and looks like it; it's long-awaited, having been on development slates since 2012; and it stars a planet-straddlingly famous actor in Austin Butler, alongside a deep bench of next-generation A-listers (Barry Keoghan, Callum Turner, Ncuti Gatwa, Bel Powley). Case closed, then. Except can the TV event of the year be the TV event of the year when you're not sure whether anyone will actually watch it?
Is anyone watching Apple TV+? It really is very hard to tell. While other streaming companies, notably Netflix, are beginning to tentatively share viewing data, Apple remains stingy with its own figures: the best we get are vague percentages viewership up 42% year on year in 2023; Slow Horses viewership up 65% from its first to second seasons, and so forth. That paints a picture of unalloyed success, but, without knowing if we're talking about thousands or millions of viewers, it's not terribly illuminating. (Independent estimates put Apple's subscriber base in the tens of millions range, compared with hundreds of millions for Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon.) In the absence of hard data, we're left to intuit Apple TV+'s popularity on the woolly concept of buzz.
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