Apple is already making a TV show with Steven Spielberg. Now it’s making another one with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
Apple is making a new TV show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston
Friends stars, reunited! In 2019, probably.
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Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
The show doesn’t have a name or a proposed air date (though spring of 2019 is a decent bet). But it’s going to be about the morning TV show industry*, and Apple is going to make at least two seasons of it.
Apple has been all-but-officially interested in the show since it hit the market this summer (so, reportedly, was Netflix).
It’s the second show Apple has officially committed to since it hired Sony TV execs Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg in June; a month ago, Apple said it would reboot Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” show from the 1980s.
In addition to reuniting Witherspoon and Aniston (Recode resident “Friends” expert Johana Bhuiyan reminds me that Witherspoon guest-starred as Aniston’s sister on that show), the show is important because it illustrates Apple’s focus on landing Very Big Names as it prepares to dive deeply into the TV business.
Apple already took a step into TV this year when it created “Planet of the Apps” and a spinoff of James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” bit. Now its executives politely chalk up those efforts as experiments, and say they’re ready to get into TV for real. Hence the Sony guys.
It’s still unclear why Apple thinks it should make its own TV shows and what its distribution plans will be for the ones it does make. But for now it seems to view them as family-friendly brand-burnishing products it can use to highlight its video capabilities.
* If you remember that CNN’s Brian Stelter once wrote a book about the real-life stories behind the morning news, then you get a gold star. Stelter, meanwhile, gets something even better: The author of “Top of the Morning” will be a consultant on this project, which Aniston and Witherspoon are executive producing.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
