Apple TV sets Small Prophets for 7 October and Nocturne for 30 October, and renews CarêmeApple TV sets Small Prophets for 7 October and Nocturne for 30 October, and renews Carême

Apple TV released trailers for two new series this week and renewed a third, Carême, for a second season.

Small Prophets, from 7 October

Apple debuted the trailer for Small Prophets on 30 September. The six-episode comedy is created, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who made Detectorists, and stars Pearce Quigley as a DIY shop worker who tries to grow magical spirits that can tell the future, with Michael Palin as his father. According to Apple's press release, the first two episodes arrive on 7 October, with one more each Wednesday until 4 November.

It is not an Apple Original. Apple announced in August that it had acquired the first season from the distributor Sphere Abacus after it aired on the BBC earlier this year, and 9to5Mac describes the licensing deal as unusual for Apple TV. The deal comes with an exclusion: viewers in the UK will not get it on Apple TV until 2027.

Nocturne, from 30 October

The trailer for Nocturne followed on 29 September. The ten-episode crime drama adapts The Sandman, a Joona Linna novel by Lars Kepler, and sets the story in western Pennsylvania. Liev Schreiber plays a former soldier turned homicide detective, Zazie Beetz an FBI agent, and Stephen Graham the serial killer Jurek Walter. Apple says the first two episodes arrive on Friday 30 October, followed by one each Friday until 25 December.

Carême renewed for a second season

Apple also announced on 29 September a second season of Carême, its French-language drama about the nineteenth-century chef Antonin Carême, starring Benjamin Voisin. Apple said filming would start in Paris the following week. No release date was given. 9to5Mac notes the first season is nominated for an International Emmy in the drama category, with the ceremony on 23 November. 9to5Mac dates the first season's debut to April 2025.

What happened in the 30 September Apple TV outage?

On the evening of 30 September, Apple's System Status page listed problems with Apple TV, the App Store, Apple Music, Fitness+, the Mac App Store and subscription purchases, according to 9to5Mac. Most began at 4.22pm Eastern time, with Apple TV following at 4.43pm, and Apple described them as maintenance. 9to5Mac found the Apple TV interface failed to load on iOS while playback worked on other devices, and noted that several Apple apps had briefly displayed internal text strings in place of their interface just before. By 7.37pm Eastern, Apple said every issue was resolved except Apple TV. Apple has not explained the cause.

Our take

Small Prophets is the item worth watching, because it shows Apple doing something it has largely avoided: buying a finished show from another broadcaster. Apple TV was built on the promise that everything on it was an Apple Original, and that is part of why its catalogue stays small next to its rivals. A licensed six-part comedy with a perfect critics' score is a cheap way to add something good, and if it works we would expect more deals like it.

The UK exclusion is the price of that deal and a slightly odd one for Apple. The show is set and filmed around Manchester and has already aired on the BBC, so the one country where it is best known is the one country where Apple TV subscribers cannot watch it until next year. That is presumably a condition of the BBC's own rights, though neither Apple nor 9to5Mac says so.

APPDOOK's view on the outage is simpler. Maintenance that takes the TV app's interface down on iPhone for several hours, on an evening when people are trying to watch, is not maintenance with no user impact, whatever the status page says. The localisation strings appearing in TestFlight and the App Store beforehand suggest a shared back-end change rather than an Apple TV problem alone. Apple rarely explains outages, and a service charging 14.99 dollars a month should be expected to say a little more than that it was working on it.