Apple TV+ reportedly shut down a planned TV show about the defunct news website Gawker, following an email from Apple CEO Tim Cook.
According to The New York Times, the would-be programme was titled Scraper but was “clearly about Gawker Media”, and involved several people who previously worked at Gawker.
Cook, the newspaper reported on Sunday, emailed an executive at the company, in which he expressed his surprise at the project and “expressed a distinctly negative view toward Gawker”.
Apple has now dropped the project.
The Independent has contacted Apple for more information.
Founded in 2003, Gawker described itself as “the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip”. The website shut down in 2016 after a $140m privacy lawsuit.
Gawker began writing about Cook’s sexuality years before he publicly came out as gay. In 2011, a profile of the tech CEO outed him as “the most powerful gay man in Silicon Valley”. That was three years before Cook chose to write about his sexuality in a first-person column for Bloomberg.
Apple TV+, Apple’s streaming service, launched a year ago, in November 2019. Its catalogue has included originals such as The Morning Show (starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell), the animated series Central Park, and Sofia Coppola’s film On the Rocks starring Tom Hanks and Rashida Jones.
