Cold Calls

After watching this week's instalment of For All Mankind early this morning1 I found myself dipping into the first half dozen episodes of new Apple TV+ show Calls before starting work for the day, then picked up on the final three episodes this evening.

I was aware that this show was coming, but had deliberately not gone out of my way to find out more. I realise that goes completely counter to the modern trend that pushes viewers to try to find out as much as possible about forthcoming programmes and speculate endlessly online about what's to come2 but I'm here to tell you that you definitely want to watch Calls with as little foreknowledge as possible of what you're about to hear.

Yes, I said "hear" not "watch." Calls is a TV show, but it could as easily have been a podcast or a radio drama. We never see any of the cast, and while the on-screen graphics do help viewers visualise what's happening and who is talking to who, the audio is sufficiently well-produced that (IMHO) it's perfectly possible to get what's happening without visuals.

No, I'm not going to say anything more about what happens in the story: all I'll say is that if you have any interest at all in a well designed and delivered piece of speculative fiction then Calls is a very worthwhile experience.

Apple TV+ probably won't get the credit they deserve for pulling it off, and given that Apple TV+ is very much the runt of the litter3 of modern streaming TV services Calls might be destined to be looked back on as an interesting failure. I do hope not; it'd be good to see more experiments like this.


  1. No, I wasn't sitting there trying to catch For All Mankind once it dropped on Apple TV+, I just happened to be awake at 5am and realised I wasn't getting back to sleep so decided I might as well fill the time until the sun came up by watching something to keep my brain occupied until it was time to prepare for the old working-from-home-office-job
  2. Contemplate Disney's recent WandaVision multimedia extravaganza for a prime example of how that can go. 
  3. Also, to be fair, I suspect Apple TV+ isn't pulling in the sort of viewing figures that Apple would have hoped for, though I'm not sure they'd want to admit that publicly just yet. When the most critically-acclaimed shows you have - Ted Lasso and The Morning Show - are between seasons Apple TV+ just isn't exactly the focus of much talk in social media, once you look beyond the more Apple-centric corners of the internet.