Things are looking great for Severance, a new Apple TV+ thriller series that launches February 18th (week from Friday).
From Apple:
From Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson, Severance centers around Mark Scout (Adam Scott), a leader of a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives.
This experiment in ‘work-life balance’ is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself.
Incredible cast including Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation), Oscar winners Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken, Emmy-winner John Turturro, lots more.
“Outtie” is Lumon’s sickly cute terminology for an employee when they’re outside the office. The “Innie” clearly receives the short end of the stick: What would motivate your work self without the memory of your family or outside life in general? You don’t know if you’re putting kids through college or saving up for a tropical vacation. You never experience nights and weekends or even sleep. Lumon’s severed employees aren’t pursuing their passions, either, as the work is so tedious it almost feels deliberate. Why would anyone endure this for the sake of their “Outtie,” who’s technically another person entirely? Well, it’s not so easy to leave. “Innies” can submit resignation requests but their “Outtie” must approve them, and Helly’s “Outtie” is quite content with the current situation. There’s a chilling moment when Helly’s “Outtie” tells her through a pre-recorded message that she’s not a “person.” Only Helly’s “Outtie” is real.
And:
Lower is a delight to watch as Helly, who moves through every scene like a caged animal.
And:
Severance’s entire cast is a symphony without a single off-note.
This week, Dave and I talk about the advances Apple has made with Face ID, especially around the pandemic and wearing a mask. We also talk about Wordle and how it has become so popular and then being sold to The New York Times. The World Trade Center is replacing office keys with Apple Wallet and Dave gives us a few shows and movies that he’s watching.
Zocdoc: NOW is the time to prioritize your health. Go to Zocdoc.com/DALRYMPLE and download the Zocdoc app to sign-up for FREE and book a top-rated doctor. Many are available as soon as today.
An armed man who allegedly searched for former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg’s daughters and kidnapped a housekeeper was arrested on Thursday, after being tracked down via the victim’s iPad.
And:
Investigators arrested Beecher on Thursday at a motel in Cheyenne, after determining the housekeeper’s location via her iPad. It is unclear whether the Find My network was used, or other methods.
Check out that business card, with the embossed Apple logo (just to the left of the word Apple), the old school name (Apple dropped the word “computer” from its name back in 2007), and Steve’s title (Vice President, Operations). I tweeted a still frame of the card here.
Even more interestingly, jump to about 1:23 in to see a floor plan for that Stevens Creek address. Amazing to see how small Apple was back then.
The auction will close on March 17th. Bidding does not yet appear to be open, but here’s a link to the auction calendar page, on the chance you’d like to own this piece of history yourself.
I have to search for a lot of movies to watch on my Apple TV because I have a movie podcast. If a movie is located within a service that I’m already paying for, then I’d like to get that.
Amen. Far too often, I search for a movie that’s available on a streaming service to which I already subscribe, and I get pointed to a place to rent/buy the movie instead.
But it gets worse:
Recently, I asked Siri to display “Fight Club,” and was presented with a button to start watching it right away in Prime Video. So easy!
Unfortunately, when it started playing, it was a very compressed, blocky stream, and I could immediately tell something was amiss. I pressed the back button and discovered that what I had clicked on was actually “Popular Movies and TV — Free with ads” within Prime Video. In other words, Amazon had embedded its ad-supported IMDb TV service inside of Prime Video, with very little to differentiate the two very different presentations.
Yup.
But in fairness, it’s also possible that some of these cases are simply caused by underfunded tech staffs at billion-dollar companies where money is spent wildly on the next big swords-and-sorcery streaming series but not on the developer who has to maintain an AppleTV app and interact with a huge back-end media database.
If Apple wants to be the hub for all movie/TV streaming, they need to solve this problem, make the user experience richer, do a better job identifying the user’s current context (I’m already watching the movie on, say, HBO, so find that before you offer to rent me the same movie).
I recognize that proprietary data might be a big part of the problem here, that Netflix/HBO/Amazon/Disney databases might be incompatible with Apple’s, and that third parties enthusiasm to make the Apple TV experience rich might be limited.
