Special Issue: AppleTV+ and Science Fiction
Special Issue: AppleTV+ and Science Fiction
Guest Editors: Burcu Kuheylan, Milt Moise, Nicholas Orlando
contact email: projectscifi.appletv@gmail.com
In this special issue of the journal, editors seek scholarly articles that contextualize and critique AppleTV+ and its production of science fiction television against the tumultuous Zeitgeist of post-2016.
The unprecedented popularity of streaming platforms has transformed the playing field, as well as the rules, of the entertainment business. It is nevertheless rare for a streaming service to aggressively invest in one particular genre as AppleTV+ has done with science fiction. Some platforms with vast repertoires, like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, sample an array of genres and narrative modes – including science fiction, action, stand-up comedy, and reality shows – without privileging quality or diverging from mainstream tastes. While Netflix operates independently of older media conglomerates, Amazon and others like Max and Hulu harness their links with “legacy” media giants, like Metro-Goldwyn-Myer; HBO and Warner Bros.; and Disney, FX, and Fox Searchlight respectively.
New to the scene is AppleTV+, which launched in 2019 and has since offered an alternative model to content production. AppleTV+'s branding and production strategies consist in offering original titles that feature A-list actors and directors while displaying a preference for the high-quality, technically proficient content that cultural commentators often associate with prestige TV. More central to this special issue, however, is the company’s investment in science-fictional media. Series such as Dark Matter (2024), Constellation (2024), and Silo (2023) are only the company’s three latest entries into a growing collection of titles including For All Mankind (2019) and Severance (2022). While AppleTV+ is not the only streaming platform fueling the popularization of science fiction on screen, TV critics and cultural commentators alike seem to agree that AppleTV+ is television’s new “sci-fi Valhalla” (Speicher, “AppleTV+ Has Become”).
This special issue accordingly invites critics to explore Apple’s investments – financial and otherwise – in science fiction. A powerhouse of consumer technologies, Apple has long drawn inspiration from the imaginaries of science fiction, not least in its marketing campaigns, which include iconic Super Bowl commercials directed by Ridley Scott (“1984”) and Mark Coppos (“Hall”); iPhone advertisements by David Fincher (“Hallway”; “Break In”); and the now-controversial “Crush” ad by Gal Muggia and Vania Heymann. In each case, the genre’s technological imaginaries were central to Apple’s marketing of its cutting-edge products, and they have since helped the brand hone its distinctive futuristic look and minimalist style.
AppleTV+’s singular emphasis on science fiction as its privileged genre of production could also reflect the company’s larger business strategies for product management and development. Under its current CEO, Tim Cook, Apple has maintained Steve Jobs’ hallmark emphases on streamlined production and paternalistic oversight. Not only does the company commit to practices of austerity and lean production models to limit the number both of original films and TV shows/episodes produced, it also reportedly supervises and “meddles'' in content production, sometimes to the chagrin of seasoned producers and directors (Goldberg and Fienberg, “Ron Moore is Ready”; Szalay, “iPhone TV”). Cook’s avoidance of controversial subjects like religion, nudity, violence, China, or negative representations of technology – or of Apple, more specifically – similarly exemplifies his tight control of the brand’s image (Mayo, “Tim Cook Reportedly”; Smith, “Apple TV”; Rosen, “Rian Johnson”; Kent, “The Problem with Canceling Jon Stewart”). Under such circumstances, the high premium AppleTV+ has placed on science fiction, how the genre informs Apple’s public image, marketing strategies, and future enterprises elicits closer scrutiny from scholarly readers and researchers of the genre.
Equally important for scholars to investigate is how Apple influences the public perception of science fiction as it cherry-picks the genre’s aesthetic and narrative tropes primarily to serve its corporate interests. The privilege such a giant of consumer technologies accords to science fiction indubitably raises the profile and visibility of this historically marginalized genre. This represents a chance for science fiction to publicize its radically different – and potentially subversive – imaginaries of what is possible, which endears the genre to its well-versed enthusiasts. In prioritizing corporate profit, however, Apple also exploits the genre’s futuristic style, aesthetic values, and cultural associations for branding purposes. Can the science fiction it sponsors effectively scrutinize, let alone dismantle, the deeper structures of inequality that the company also perpetuates beyond a fashionable lip service to pluralism, diversity, and globalism? How can we read Apple’s self-fashioning through science fiction in light of, say, its manufacturing partnerships with off-shore sweatshops like the Chinese Foxconn or its failure to provide its content writers a home with proper work conditions, job security, and equitable compensation (Albergotti, “Apple Accused”; Fuster, “#BadApple”)? Given Apple's record of complicity in resource extraction, labor exploitation, and union-busting politics, this issue invites contributors not simply to affirm but to critique the Apple brand’s sci-fi output against the contentious political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics of the contemporary.
Such critique has increased urgency as Apple launched its streaming platform and focus on science fiction in a moment of social and political instability in the U.S. and around the globe. Our contemporary moment reflects what Lauren Berlant has dubbed “crisis ordinariness” (Cruel Optimism), which not only overwhelms our perceptive capacities but also defies the conventional limits of the real – the global rise of right-wing politics with a flagrant disregard for objectivity, facts, or truth; concomitant assaults on women’s reproductive rights and equal opportunity initiatives that helped promote racial justice; the rising number of havocs wreaked by climate-change-caused natural disasters; the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; the mass migration of people fleeing wars, violence, famine, or political persecution; and the attacks against the LGBTQ+ community are only a few examples. Against this state of crisis ordinariness, how can we read Apple as an agent in the (re)production of convergent worlds of aesthetics, economics, and politics? What do Apple’s images of futurity and history do for viewers at a moment of impasse? What kinds of social and political imaginaries does Apple open up and/or disavow? And how can we read these imaginaries against the neoliberal capitalist logics they mediate?
Some possible topics may include AppleTV+ in relation to:
- Generic developments/trends in science fiction (TV);
- Science fiction in the post-truth political moment;
- Streaming TV and Media (adaptation, mediation, and/or immediacy);
- Writing sci-fi in the age of globalization, corporate profit, and labor precarity;
- Shifts in social class, labor organization, and worker solidarity;
- The aesthetics of political economy (venture capital; "stealth wealth");
- The cult and operational logic of disruption (& the rise of AI);
- The history/trajectory of the Apple brand, television, and marketing;
- The potential and limits of futurism and techno-solutionism;
- Nostalgia – (esp. in the context of the MAGA movement's backlashes against women, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants);
- Politics, economics, and social (re)production of science-fiction aesthetics;
- Representations of work/anti-work movements and politics;
- Crises -- aesthetic, reproductive, climate, economic, care work, immigration, political, and leadership;
- Science fictional representations of futurity (Utopian & Dystopian).
Abstracts of no more than 500 words will be due by March 31, 2025. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by May 30, 2025 with complete drafts of 5,000-7,500 words due by November 28, 2025.
Please submit abstracts and questions to projectscifi.appletv@gmail.com.
