{"id":60671,"date":"2025-10-01T09:20:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T14:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=60671"},"modified":"2026-02-02T11:27:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T17:27:15","slug":"price-tag-tv-and-the-transformation-of-television-prestige","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/price-tag-tv-and-the-transformation-of-television-prestige\/","title":{"rendered":"Price-Tag TV and the Transformation of Television Prestige"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cIt says something interesting about our cultural moment,\u201d declares The New York Times<\/em><\/a>, that the lead of the rom-com Materialists<\/em> (2025), an online matchmaker, tells her rich love interest, who works in finance, exactly how much she makes. \u201cConcrete numbers are startling, even distracting,\u201d the article adds, and \u201cit\u2019s both bracing and thoroughly of-the-moment for a movie to name salary numbers.\u201d This \u201cgrounds the characters in our reality,\u201d and the film feels \u201cso very 2025\u201d in part because \u201cit\u2019s become harder and more expensive to get by since the 1990s,\u201d and \u201cwe live in a world where young women talk openly on social media platforms about how to get men to send you money, how to find a sugar daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those terms are pretty broad, but mainstream amusements have indeed been indexing salaries, prices, and other pecuniary markers of class in a seemingly new way, as if to ground themselves and their audiences in something stable. At the end of The White Lotus<\/em> Season 3, Belinda Lindsey, another service professional, justifies taking a $5 million bribe by asking, \u201cCan I just be rich for five fucking minutes?\u201d Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald<\/a> wondered how rich that would make her: \u201cFive million is \u2026 not what it was a few years ago, season 2, let\u2019s say.\u201d The payoff will allow Belinda to stay rich for more than five minutes, figured at a million a minute, but maybe not by much. Her ask registers anxiety that \u201cour reality\u201d is fiscally volatile and inflationary, and the middle class has no hope of making it to the far shore on which the obscenely wealthy lounge. Except in filmed entertainments: in The White Lotus<\/em>, viewers able to pay HBO $9.99\/month (with ads) can vacation with the superrich and savor the drama\u2019s withering satire as if it were a fine wine they couldn\u2019t otherwise afford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something different is afoot in Apple\u2019s Jon Hamm vehicle, Your Friends & Neighbors. <\/em>Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, a divorced and recently fired hedge fund manager who burgles his rich Westchester neighbors so he can maintain a lavish lifestyle and stay close to his family. During his capers, he prices the luxury items with which he and his neighbors surround themselves. Subsequent episodes feature new products, only some of which he steals, like Patek Philippe watches, Richard Mille Felipe Massa automatic chronographs, Herm\u00e8s bags, and the Rolls-Royce Spectre. Each is lovingly shot, its features and allure listed alongside current retail and resale prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cLike the ad says,\u201d Cooper intones, \u201cyou never really own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation.\u201d Surely these were paid spots<\/a>, critics opined. They were not. In fact, Apple TV+ is the only major streamer with no ads. But that\u2019s because the service is itself a sophisticated marketing machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like so many TV+ shows, Your Friends<\/em> exists to create and sell Apple\u2019s luxury brand, which in this case means naming and pricing the luxury goods in whose midst the drama places us. These should<\/em> be your friends and neighbors, because this<\/em> is your natural habitat\u2014Apple\u2019s zip code, in effect. Cooper\u2019s name evokes Don Draper\u2019s firm, Sterling Cooper, in Mad Men<\/em>. But it also evokes Cupertino, the location of Apple\u2019s headquarters, and at its rotten core Your Friends<\/em> exemplifies Apple\u2019s efforts not just to upsell its aspirational customers but subtly to change their sense of what good TV is and does. Because at bottom, TV+ indexes the quality and prestige of its typically very expensive offerings to the dollar amounts spent in and on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quantity, Not Quality<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Critics have cycled through different names for the ambitious television that first appeared on HBO at the end of the last millennium. Used to identify upmarket target demographics on behalf of advertisers as far back as the 1970s, \u201cquality TV\u201d appealed in the early 2000s, in part because it named ostensibly intrinsic attributes that made a new generation of cable comedies and dramas objectively better than previous TV. The widespread recognition of those attributes contributed, in turn, to the emergence in the aughts and teens of \u201cprestige TV\u201d: a term that denoted an achieved status shift. A new kind of TV had escaped the confines of the merely popular and become more generally esteemed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPrestige TV\u201d acquired popularity in the buildup to what, in 2015, FX CEO John Landgraf called \u201cpeak TV.\u201d Landgraf referred to neither quality nor prestige, but rather to the outsized role that TV generally had come to assume across Hollywood, as one after another studio rushed to emulate earlier darlings. \u201cPeak\u201d suggested a bubble about to burst. \u201cThere\u2019s simply too much television,\u201d Landgraf said, \u201ca huge oversupply.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flash forward 10 years. The bubble has<\/em> burst in the wake of the Writers Guild of America strike and the contraction of legacy media companies, which have scaled back production significantly, faced with the reality that they cannot compete with Netflix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And even Netflix itself has stepped back from prestige TV. By sheer volume, it offers as much smart fare as boutique outlets like FX or HBO. And the streamer committed early on to recognizable TV prestige in House of Cards <\/em>and Orange Is the New Black<\/em>, for example (thank you, Cindy Holland). But once Stranger Things<\/em> concludes, it will have few multiyear dramas that resemble the black-market melodramas<\/a> that previously defined ambitious TV. Content chief Bela Bajaria came close to acknowledging this pivot away from ostensibly fancy fare and toward what she famously called \u201cgourmet cheeseburgers\u201d when she claimed recently, \u201cNobody knows what \u2018prestige TV\u2019 actually is<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Netflix serves up good and bad shows and doesn\u2019t want to signal their relative merits. It lets a hundred flowers bloom and arranges them with taste algorithms that care not a whit about status. A related story might be told about Amazon, which has been embracing \u201cmiddle-aged guys with guns TV.\u201d Bosch, Reacher, Hunters, Jack Ryan, Cross, <\/em>and The Terminal List<\/em> sport \u201cdifficult men,\u201d but the similarities to earlier prestige programming stop there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like so many TV+ shows, \u201cYour Friends\u201d exists to create and sell Apple\u2019s luxury brand, which in this case means naming and pricing the luxury goods in whose midst the drama places us.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Apple TV+ is an entirely different matter. Many have anointed it \u201cthe New HBO<\/a>,\u201d and it\u2019s easy to see why. Cupertino\u2019s long-standing commitment to luxury all but requires emulating HBO. Since its 2019 launch, TV+ has done this in large part by lavishing  money on A-list Hollywood talent. But Apple shows are not really like HBO\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TV+ shows better exemplify what James Poniewozik calls \u201cMid TV<\/a>,\u201d \u201cgood-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.\u201d That bland if expensive type \u201cgoes down easy,\u201d Poniewozik says, and is \u201cfine.\u201d Indeed, with few exceptions, Apple shows are \u2026 fine. The comedies are on the whole better than the dramas, which buckle under the weight of their prestige ambitions. The dramas want to be taken seriously but almost always play it safe, politically and aesthetically: their edges are polished down with an engineer\u2019s eye, in the service of compatibility with the larger Apple ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But TV+ shows aren\u2019t simply unsuccessful facsimiles of older ones. Nor are they incidentally expensive. Yearly TV+ losses of about $1 billion prop up Apple\u2019s prestige play, by testifying to the company\u2019s willingness to pay for quality\u2014which it measures in turn in dollars spent and dollars shown. Apple\u2019s \u201cPrice-Tag TV,\u201d to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can\u2019t see or don\u2019t care about the difference between good and expensive.1<\/a><\/sup> Price-Tag TV is a lazy watch for the affluent and self-satisfied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cupertino (Zip) Code<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Apple logo,\u201d Scott Galloway notes, \u201cis the global badge of wealth, education, and Western values.\u201d But \u201cApple did not start as a luxury brand,\u201d he notes. \u201cIt was the best house in a shitty neighborhood, tech hardware. A world of cables, geekware, acronyms, and low margins.\u201d Tech was low-rent and ugly (remember cyberpunk?) before Steve Jobs and Jony Ive proved the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iWatch could signify luxury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But maintaining the brand\u2019s allure after Jobs\u2019s death and Ive\u2019s departure has been tricky. This is especially true since Apple products have become only more expensive versions of all but identical alternatives. Cupertino sells $1,000+ phones to those who might have near equivalents available almost for free but value the company\u2019s elegantly stylized appeal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TV+ is a platform for advertising Apple products and, more broadly, part of a push into rent-bearing services that offset shrinking margins in Apple\u2019s device business. I\u2019ve elaborated on those functions<\/a> and others<\/a>. But at bottom, TV+ is a luxury brand factory. It is like the Mural of Souls in the TV+ SF drama Foundation<\/em>: moving images that decorate the most exclusive of walls. Apple understands the good life and wants to share it with us. Indeed, it is already<\/em> sharing it with us, by way of its devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gorgeous homes and affluent families litter the TV+ canon, in Shrinking<\/em>, The Studio<\/em>, Presumed Innocent<\/em>, Disclaimer<\/em>, The Buccaneers<\/em>, Palm Royale<\/em>, The Last Thing He Told Me<\/em>, and Bad Sisters<\/em>, to name a few. That\u2019s a significantly higher ratio of affluence relative to Apple\u2019s limited library than on other streamers. More revealing are TV+ shows celebrating luxury brands and goods: Loot<\/em>, in which a newly minted billionaire makes much of her La DoubleJ and Alexander McQueen outfits (while using Apple devices); Drops of God<\/em>, about French and Japanese vintners graced with an ability to taste the origins of fine wines; The New Look<\/em>, about the wartime adventures of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel; and Car\u00eame<\/em>, about the adventures of the world\u2019s first celebrity chef\u2014in Napoleon\u2019s court. These shows offer vicarious access to a world of luxury in which they often place Apple products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That access does not always require luxury goods. In Apple TV\u2019s The Studio<\/em>, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) is told by his \u201ccorporate overlord\u201d (Bryan Cranston) to produce a \u201chuge, four-quadrant\u201d movie about \u201cthe legacy brand\u201d Kool-Aid. Inspired by Barbie<\/em>, Remick wants a \u201cfancy,\u201d \u201cauteur-driven, Oscar-winning\u201d film. So when Martin Scorsese pitches a film to Remick about the Jamestown massacre, eager for Remick\u2019s $250 million budget, he titles his project Kool-Aid<\/em>. Yet Remick rejects it, going instead with a down-market pitch in which \u201cKool-Aid man\u201d\u2014a \u201clogo in a world of logos\u201d\u2014drinks at the local bar with Jello, Chef Boyardee, and Velveeta. Still, Remick\/Rogen has to tell Scorsese that the studio is going in a different direction. And when he does (at Charlize Theron\u2019s house), the director spits, \u201cYou\u2019re just another run-of-the-mill faceless, talentless, spineless suit. \u2026 give me back my movie, and let me go sell it to fucking Apple, which I should have done in the first place.\u201d The message is simple: Apple is where you go (where you already have gone) to escape cheap brands and logos.
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Your Friends & Neighbors <\/em>commits to that message with glee, while signaling its prestige-worthy seriousness. This mishmash of Mad Men<\/em> and Breaking Bad<\/em> embroils Cooper in a recognizable secret second life. But in Apple\u2019s version of prestige TV, the lead is not morally gray tending to black. Cooper\u2019s crime is simply not spending more time with family. And in Your Friends<\/em>, Don Draper gets his family back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The drama announces its prestige ambitions almost line by line, but clumsily. It begins with Cooper waking up in a palatial home next to a dead body and then stumbling into a pool. \u201cI know what you\u2019re thinking,\u201d he says as he sinks slowly, in a voiceover that sets up an extended flashback. \u201cThe pool is a metaphor.\u201d Cooper then tells us he \u201cwasn\u2019t generally the kind of guy who did a lot of introspection\u201d before confessing, \u201cat that moment, I couldn\u2019t help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the swirling hot mess of my life and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had we known anything at all about Cooper\u2019s predicament before the delivery of these lines, we might<\/em> have thought his fall into the pool (rather than just \u201cthe pool\u201d) a metaphor for, say, drowning in life obligations that keep him from family. But the metaphor\u2019s precise tenor doesn\u2019t matter; rather, the line announces the show\u2019s half-assed relation to the sophistication to which it will pretend. Two episodes later, as Cooper watches his drunk wealth manager disgorge an evening\u2019s worth of very old scotch, the voiceover offers this: \u201cIf you\u2019re in the market for metaphors, look no further than a man vomiting into a $30,000 toilet that isn\u2019t connected to any plumbing. Though, once you get into a certain frame of mind, everything in this town is a fucking metaphor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A metaphor for what, exactly? No matter: Your Friends<\/em> is in the market less for specific metaphors than for the market niche they secure. We can imagine Eddy Cue, head of Apple\u2019s Services Division, which oversees TV+, asking for the show to make ample use of the word \u201cmetaphor\u201d\u2014because reminding viewers they\u2019re consuming metaphors, rather than simply affluence, might elevate this breathtakingly vapid drama. Perhaps then we might confuse the show with The White Lotus<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The season\u2019s last episode takes this empty pretense to embarrassing lows. Cooper is having a panic attack as he struggles to prove his innocence in the face of a murder charge. His voiceover intones, \u201cJay McInerney wrote, \u2018everything becomes symbol and irony when you\u2019ve been betrayed,\u2019 and if it was symbolism you were after, there I was breaking into the house of my former lover to find a phone that was almost certainly not there in a desperate bid at a redemption I wasn\u2019t sure I deserved.\u201d Duly impressed by the sound of these words, the episode titles itself \u201cEverything becomes symbol and irony.\u201d But we search in vain for either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, Cooper says that in his town, \u201cnothing is as it seems.\u201d But everything here and in this show is exactly as it seems\u2014which is also to say, everything here costs exactly what it costs. And in the drama\u2019s purely quantitative logic, metaphor for metaphor\u2019s sake is all but indistinguishable from price for price\u2019s sake. Each refers mainly to itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat might be called use value in the reception of cultural assets,\u201d Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer noted in 1944, \u201cis being replaced by exchange value.\u201d As they saw it, \u201cthose who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent.\u201d But in the 1940s culture industry, \u201cEverything has value only insofar as it can be exchanged.\u201d This means, as Adorno explained elsewhere, that the consumer at a Toscanini concert, for example, is \u201creally worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TV+ indexes the quality and prestige of its typically very expensive offerings to the dollar amounts spent in and on them.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That misguided worship reflected the industrial massification of culture but still traded on atavistic forms of cultural deference and pretense: Toscanini performing \u201cclassical music,\u201d for example, or Hollywood\u2019s \u201cconnoisseurship by enhanced prestige,\u201d which offers film \u201cenjoyment\u201d as a way of \u201cbeing there and being in the know.\u201d A similar dynamic now obtains with Apple, whose luxury connoisseurship rehearses prestige TV as an empty formalism, in a mechanical reduction of TV quality to quantity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your Friends<\/em> is a derivative instrument, for example, that trades on a prestige underlier. Asked by The New York Times<\/em> if the drama\u2019s \u201cthemes, style and wardrobe\u201d were nods to Mad Men<\/em>, Hamm replied, \u201cThere\u2019s something to be said for that,\u201d before adding, \u201cThere\u2019s also something to be said for subverting that.\u201d A fluff piece that features images of Hamm in an array of sharp outfits, the Times<\/em> article obliges: it declares Your Friends<\/em> \u201ca critique of conspicuous consumption.\u201d But it\u2019s easier to say \u201cthere\u2019s something to be said\u201d than to say it. And ultimately, this show is less a critique than a market hedge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Witness creator Jonathan Tropper struggling to clarify his Robin Hood-but-not-really premise, \u201cthe real danger in acquiring wealth is there\u2019s nothing evil about wealth, per se: The danger is the amount of time and effort you spend acquiring it<\/a>,\u201d a handy credo with which to secure the moral superiority of the hedge fund manager over the wage worker. But make no mistake, Cooper is just a regular guy. He was rich and now isn\u2019t, but has always been an everyman, if only because he\u2019s had bills to pay. He has \u201crelatable<\/a>\u201d characteristics, says Hamm. \u201cNot everybody is worrying about how they\u2019re gonna pay their $300,000 mortgage or fix their $200,000 car. But other than the mathematics of scale, I think those are problems that people have.\u201d The right \u201cmathematics of scale\u201d reveals that the billionaire\u2019s broken Maserati and the wage worker\u2019s mortgage are simply the same problem at different price points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your Friends<\/em> seems to attract fuzzy math (and thought). Ross Douthat proclaimed it \u201ca useful balm for the resentments of people who assume that they\u2019d definitely be happier with $10 million in the bank<\/a>.\u201d That is tone deaf: Cooper robs his neighbors because he wants to stay their neighbor, and we tag happily along as he acquiesces to community mores, snorting premium coke, downing top-shelf scotch, and bedding beautiful divorc\u00e9es. He\u2019s aloof but not disdainful while enjoying these decadent delights\u2014which allows us to enjoy the ride while feeling superior to it. But more relevant is Douthat\u2019s joking pitch to his New York Times <\/em>editors: bankroll six months of research in a similar community at $20 million. Tropper might appreciate this neat bit of arbitrage, in which six months at $20 million simulates life with $10 million saved. But what\u2019s ultimately most striking is the casting about for the right number, as if the whole point of the show (and Douthat\u2019s column) were correctly to price the lifestyle on display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s easy enough to imagine a version of Your Friends<\/em> that provokes critical engagement rather than number crunching. Bret Easton Ellis has written it, in fact, and Your Friends<\/em> references American Psycho<\/em>\u2019s Patrick Bateman, another financier besotted with luxury. Bateman frequently recounts the cost of his upmarket brands: a $4,000 Gianfranco Ferr\u00e9 trench coat, a $3,500 Durgin Gorham tea set, a $20,000 watch, etc. But his torture and serial murder metaphorize the brutal operations of finance capitalism<\/a>\u2014and Your Friends<\/em> is not that kind of metaphor. It instead assures us, like a good Visa commercial, that the best things in life are priceless\u2014when you\u2019ve paid top dollar for everything else. When Cooper\u2019s ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), surveys a table littered with gifts, she spies a crumpled brown bag from Andrew; he\u2019s given her Atomic Fireballs, and she tears up remembering sharing them. This is one of many shoutouts to Mad Men<\/em>\u2019s \u201cThe Wheel,\u201d and we understand that, though swaddled in lavish trappings, Mel values family most of all. Your Friends<\/em> surrounds Apple\u2019s viewers with luxury goods too, so they can wear them lightly, confident the brands do not define them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They Come in Different Colors<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Apple shows come off the assembly line in batches, clustered around similar themes and plot points and differentiated just enough to appeal to distinct segments of Apple\u2019s broadly affluent demographic. An Owen Wilson vehicle that premiered days after the finale of Your Friends<\/em>, Stick <\/em>also features a once-at-the-top-of-his-game-but-now-out-of-work sad dude separated from his wife, but still in love with her. He must rekindle his joy before they (maybe) reunite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s better than Your Friends<\/em>, and thankfully devoid of the drama\u2019s pretentions, but also uses its sad dude to guide us through a world of wealth and privilege, in this case country clubs and golf tournaments. His name, appropriately enough, is Pryce, which leads him to joke \u201cthe Pryce is right,\u201d for example, when tutoring his links prot\u00e9g\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The similarities are more striking between Your Friends <\/em>and Government Cheese<\/em>, which dropped days after and ran alongside the Hamm vehicle throughout the spring. A David Oyelowo comedy about an African American engineer released from prison and struggling to reunite with his family in the 1969 San Fernando Valley, this show seems different, not least because Oyelowo\u2019s quirky but tonally adroit comedy\u2014which disappeared almost immediately from critical conversation\u2014is easily one of the best shows Apple has made thus far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But both Your Friends<\/em> and Government Cheese<\/em> are about a husband resorting to thievery to reunite with an estranged family, made up of a wife who loves him but will no longer tolerate his emotional absence and two kids, one initially hostile and one warm, the latter of whom is applying for college. The husbands\u2019 names gesture to each other: \u201cHampton\u201d Chambers to a zip code like Coop\u2019s, and \u201cCoop\u201d to Hampton\u2019s prison confinement. The eventual return of each husband \u201csaves\u201d each wife from an interracial romance: Mel gives up the African American Nick Brandes to return to Coop and Astoria Chambers will stop dating her white boyfriend to return to Hampton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More strikingly, Government Cheese<\/em> pauses to call attention, again, to metaphor. Astoria is getting high watching TV and contemplating her life. The happy wife in a coffee commercial comes to life and explicates: \u201cCoffee is a metaphor. \u2026 The coffee is a metaphor for taking care of your husband.\u201d Apple exec Eddy Cue is surely mollified, and not just because he loves metaphor. These intralibrary patterns\u2014and Apple\u2019s self-reference generally\u2014elevate the TV+ brand over the show proper, making the C-suite the author of note, or even the origin of something like providential design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astoria climbs to her roof and, having decided that she will pursue her career rather than wait on Hampton, jumps off\u2014into the pool below. She emerges beaming, converted to her new life. Hampton himself experienced a life-altering submersion in the previous episode: fishing, he\u2019s dragged underwater by a giant catfish. We see him slowly sinking, like Coop. And here is the conversion metaphor for which Your Friends<\/em> was groping. Swallowed by the catfish, Hampton is a penitent Jonah. He pledges himself to a more righteous path and is spit out.
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Luxury began with theology, Scott Galloway reminds us. \u201cFor millennia, we\u2019ve knelt in churches, mosques, and temples, looked around and thought, \u2018There is no way human hands could have created \u2026 this alchemy of sound, art, and architecture without divine inspiration.\u2019\u201d Over time, we came to associate \u201cthe combined aesthetic overwhelm from superior artisanship with the presence of God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apple devices aim for that overwhelm, and\u2014as if compelled by some version of it\u2014TV+ characters are forever falling or walking into deep waters: on Lisey\u2019s Story, Surface, Lady in the Lake, Adventure<\/em>, Fountain of Youth, Government Cheese, <\/em>and Your Friends<\/em>, for example. Taken together, these diverse brand baptisms respond to the upbeat messages in Ted Lasso<\/em>, Shrinking<\/em>, The Big Door Prize<\/em>, and Lessons in Chemistry<\/em>, each of which exhorts us to \u201cBelieve!\u201d\u2014as Lasso puts it\u2014less in any god than in ourselves, and the infinite promise of our beautiful, upwardly mobile lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upgrade yourself by waking to the adventure of self-discovery. What else are you going to do, having acquired more wealth in less time?<\/p>\n\n\n

  1. Critics have been generally impressed by TV+. NPR <\/em>claims this is \u201cthe streaming service with the best shows you have never (or, at least, rarely) heard of<\/a>.\u201d For Vanity Fair<\/em>, it\u2019s \u201cstreaming\u2019s critically adored underdog<\/a>.\u201d The Ringer<\/em> says, \u201cApple\u2019s pursuit of quality scripted content\u2014delivered primarily via big-budget shows and films filled with stacked, marquee casts and deluxe visuals\u2014has paid off in prestige<\/a>.\u201d I disagree. But more interesting is The Ringer<\/em>\u2019s telling association of big budgets and quality. This appears in many accounts of what Los Angeles Times<\/em> calls the streamer\u2019s \u201cquality over quantity approach<\/a>,\u201d the simple proposition is that Apple has intentionally committed to the former over the latter, dedicating some presumably fixed sum of money to fewer well-done shows rather than many poorly done ones. \u201cIt\u2019s been brilliant at defining its niche,\u201d says Stephen Galloway, cited by the LA Times<\/em>, \u201cand the quality of what it does is simply superb.\u201d It\u2019s still an open question, he adds, if \u201cthe niche [is] big enough to justify the expense.\u201d But it\u2019s not an open question if the expense is<\/em> the quality. \u201cThe quality of the films has been extremely impressive<\/a>,\u201d says Wedbush Securities\u2019 Dan Ives, quoted in Variety<\/em>. \u201cThey just don\u2019t have enough [product]. I think that\u2019s been the tug of war with Apple.\u201d \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Apple\u2019s \u201cPrice-Tag TV,\u201d to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can\u2019t see or don\u2019t care about the difference between good and expensive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":60691,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"Critics have been generally impressed by TV+. NPR <\/em>claims this is \u201cthe streaming service with the best shows you have never (or, at least, rarely) heard of<\/a>.\u201d For Vanity Fair<\/em>, it\u2019s \u201cstreaming\u2019s critically adored underdog<\/a>.\u201d The Ringer<\/em> says, \u201cApple\u2019s pursuit of quality scripted content\u2014delivered primarily via big-budget shows and films filled with stacked, marquee casts and deluxe visuals\u2014has paid off in prestige<\/a>.\u201d I disagree. But more interesting is The Ringer<\/em>\u2019s telling association of big budgets and quality. This appears in many accounts of what Los Angeles Times<\/em> calls the streamer\u2019s \u201cquality over quantity approach<\/a>,\u201d the simple proposition is that Apple has intentionally committed to the former over the latter, dedicating some presumably fixed sum of money to fewer well-done shows rather than many poorly done ones. \u201cIt\u2019s been brilliant at defining its niche,\u201d says Stephen Galloway, cited by the LA Times<\/em>, \u201cand the quality of what it does is simply superb.\u201d It\u2019s still an open question, he adds, if \u201cthe niche [is] big enough to justify the expense.\u201d But it\u2019s not an open question if the expense is<\/em> the quality. \u201cThe quality of the films has been extremely impressive<\/a>,\u201d says Wedbush Securities\u2019 Dan Ives, quoted in Variety<\/em>. \u201cThey just don\u2019t have enough [product]. I think that\u2019s been the tug of war with Apple.\u201d\",\"id\":\"cd4e7bc1-abaf-440b-905f-ce9483f7e0f6\"}]"},"categories":[2497],"tags":[1786,77,641,232,79,2294,80,314],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1139],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-60671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-apple","tag-class","tag-consumerism","tag-criticism","tag-drama","tag-prestige-tv","tag-television","tag-wealth","section-tv"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPrice-Tag TV and the Transformation of Television Prestige - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Apple\u2019s \u201cPrice-Tag TV,\u201d to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can\u2019t see or don\u2019t care about the difference between good and expensive.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/price-tag-tv-and-the-transformation-of-television-prestige\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Price-Tag TV and the Transformation of Television Prestige - 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