Cracking Apple TV: The Shows It Wants Now

Now that the Writers Guild has ratified its new (four-year) contract with the major studios, Hollywood’s scribes are back out pitching and scrapping to get a show on the air — under tougher conditions than ever.

Streamers and networks are no longer in the business of maybe. They are “only buying things that they think they can make,” says a TV lit agent. “That’s the biggest change. Five to 10 years ago, people had pretty robust development slates. They would take flyers if there was a writer that they loved, even if it perfectly didn’t fit exactly what they were trying to do. Even if they knew it would be a long shot, they would just develop it.”

Now? At every single buyer, says this rep, “no one is buying anything that they do not think there’s a path to get made.”

Translation: If there’s no clear path to production, your pitch is dead on arrival.

So, for writers and producers hustling for a green light, here’s the pitch manual you need: my Spring Sellers’ Guide — my bi-annual series for paid subscribers that breaks down what every major buyer will actually buy right now, based on conversations with agents, producers, writers and development executives.

I’m starting today with Apple TV (which dropped the + from its name since the last time I wrote a TV sellers guide), whose low-profile creative exec team and development processes remain among the industry’s most opaque black boxes. Apple, the $4 trillion tech giant, will start a new era come Sept. 1 with a fresh CEO, John Ternus, whom my colleague Lesley Goldberg describes as a “hardware guy with no significant ties to the entertainment industry.” For now, that hasn’t changed the mandate — but insiders are watching to see if the already narrow brief tightens further.

A second longtime TV literary agent sums up the streamer’s present appetite: “Premium, yet populist. Movie stars. Big TV stars. You know, kind of what HBO was doing during the height of HBO.”

The strategy is working: Apple TV is coming off of a huge year that saw Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s inside baseball satire The Studio become the winningest first-year comedy series in Emmy history with 13 statuettes. The streamer also clocked record Emmy nominations in 2025 for its popular dystopian drama Severance and brought home a win for Gary Oldman thriller Slow Horses.

But there have been personnel shifts in its lean-but-steady core team of development and programming executives in the past year. Most notably, Paramount+ poached creative exec Chris Parnell last August; after five years at Apple TV, the former co-pres of Sony Pictures TV Studios now shepherds originals under P+’s head of development Jane Wiseman. More recently, Apple TV’s international scripted exec Oliver Jones is leaving after six years and relocating to London to join Amazon MGM Studios under international originals head Nicole Clemens.

“It’ll be interesting to see if anything changes, mandate-wise, with some of these personnel changes,” says the second agent.

Below, I break down how to sell at Apple TV — and crack open the black box — including:

• The three execs with greenlight power and five key team members reps admire, including the one “you wanna grab a beer with”
• One rep’s standard warning for clients before a meeting at Apple TV
• The genres and formats Apple wants, the one that’s hardest to crack there — and three things not to pitch
• Why the team is cool on YA despite its massive hits on other streamers
• How much Apple will spend per episode on a big drama
• The door The Morning Show is opening for creators, and the cerebral drama that made the cut without a brand-name showrunner