Hollywood is racing to do business with Apple in hopes to help the iPhone-maker create its first breakout TV series and movies.
Apple’s LA-based TV execs, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, have been lining up meetings with some of the top names in town, according to a new report that sheds some light on the company’s TV strategy. Everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Steven Spielberg has pitched the duo. But in true Apple fashion, they’re being very picky about what they say yes to.
2015 brought us a souped-up Apple TV, so it’s great news that the same year yielded plenty of high-quality entertainment to watch on the fourth-generation device.
From tenured favorites like ’60s Madison Avenue masterpiece Mad Men to the arrival of smash hits like Mr. Robot, there was no shortage of great entertainment gracing our screens.
In our humble opinions, these were the best TV shows of 2015.
A lot of TV happens every day, and it’s understandable if you can’t watch all of it. Maybe you have a job or read or something. But now, the holidays have given you the gift of several days off with nothing to do but open presents, eat and watch television, so you might as well make up for lost time.
Here are five TV shows you should cram into your face like so much Christmas goose before you have to go back to work.
We’re nearly a week away from ringing in the new year and all the craziness that 2015 is going to bring with it, but before we go into holiday hibernation mode, we wanted to take a look back at the most GIF-worthy events of 2014.
From Ellen’s hilarious Oscar selfie, to ‘the greatest catch ever’, 2014 was filled with incredible moments that captured the Internet’s fascination thanks to the glory of the GIFs.
Without further adieu, these were our favorite GIFs of 2014:
Thanks to a money-hungry decision to split the final season, a la Breaking Bad, the last episodes of Mad Men won’t air until next year. On the plus side, that means this is the perfect time to play catch-up before the world goes Don Draper crazy one last time.
If for some incredible reason you’ve never seen Mad Men before (and how I envy you if that’s the case), the show follows the lives of a few Madison Avenue ad men and women during the 1950s and '60s. We’ve now reached the point of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and things are set for a grand finale.
Photo: HBO
Designs from California bag outfitter Booq tend toward the highly unorthodox and original; the last time I wrote about one of their bags I even made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the company’s gear was designed by folks from outer space.
But with its square-jawed, establishment lines and pockets that open conventionally, Booq’s new $150 Boa brief laptop bag seems like it would look much more at home on the set of Mad Men than it would on the set of Battlestar Galactica.
Apple’s clever iPad mini ads that have been featured on the back covers of Time, Wired, the New Yorker, and Surfer, were just awarded one of the most prestigious advertising award in the world today.
The Apple iPad mini campaign by TBWA Media Arts Lab won the Grand Prix in press even though the iPad mini has been viewed by many as the device that will eventually kill newspapers and magazine. To get the top prize, Apple beat out strong competition from Dove and Beijing Sports.
Marcello Serpa, chief creative officer at Almap BBDO presided over the judging and had the following explanation for why Apple won:
One of the saddest things about tech is that unlike other fashionable things, the aesthetic trend that might dictate what gadgets look like for a few years never gets a chance to come back into style. The most we ever get is the chance to be nostalgic about the look of an old gadget, not to fall in love with the aesthetic behind its design all over again, as if new.
For example, debatably thanks to AMC’s period drama Mad Men, Danish mid-century design has really come back into style. A whole new generation of people have come to discover and love a design trend that a mere two years ago, all but a few people would have, at best, only known by a couple musty old relics collecting dust and mouldering in their grandparents’ garage. Watching Don Draper slip into an Eames lounge chair, or pour himself a drink from a gorgeous teak sideboard, or turn on a tulip lamp designed by Eero Sarinen, though, rejuvenates these items by allowing us to see them as they were meant to be used and experienced. It removes real, living objects from the obscurity of textbooks and turns them into fresh ideas, ready to be used again.
It’s for this reason that I love seeing wood in a gadget. It takes a trend that was ubiquitous in the 70s and 80s, when home electronics were big and bulky enough to be mostly considered a kind of furniture, and presents it as a refreshing anecdote to a modern trend in tech design that puts the emphasis on more impersonal and space-age materials like plastic and metal, silicon and glass.
For me, wood can imply an intimacy — a device is yours, it was made for you — that makes it a perfect material for a smartphone: a device that is, by definition, the gadget with which most of us have our most personal relationship. And while Apple understandably doesn’t make iPhones out of wood, I’m delighted that a company like Monolith does, by offering a stunning line of natural wood backs for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that are as practical as they are beautiful.
Which phone would fictional advertising genius Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men use? No surprises here: as this picture of Jon Hamm from the set of the hit television proves, only the phone with the best and most convincing advertising campaign on Earth, an iPhone, would do for Draper.
[via iSource]
