See, review: new Apple TV+ series lacks vision

Apple brought hipster chic to the tech industry with its sexy laptops, shiny smartphones and gummy-bear desktop computers. So conquering prestige TV with the new Apple TV + service may have looked an easy win for the Californian gadget gurus. After all, what were The Sopranos, Mad Men and Game of Thrones but perfectly engineered entertainments, obsessively designed and flawless to behold? Slightly pretentious high-end television must have struck the company as just its thing.

Alas, the Silicon Valley titan rather impales itself through the foot with its first entry into popcorn TV and a show that makes no secret of its ambition to be the new Game of Thrones. With a rumoured $15 million per episode budget – the same as the final season of the HBO smash – See (Apple TV+) is undeniably ravishing. It is also dreary, hysterical and often simply inept. A song of cripes and dire, if you will.

The biggest problem is the completely bonkers premise of a post-apocalyptic North America where everyone is born blind yet somehow goes about their daily lives essentially unimpeded. The idea was hatched by Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence – who oversees three of eight episodes – and Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. The latter really is on a streak having recently killed the Mathew McConaughey “McConnaissance” stone dead with his bizarre “it’s all a video game” turkey Serenity.

As is obligatory with these things, everyone has a silly name. There’s an off-screen messiah figure called Jerlamarel. Say hello, too, to Tamacti Jun, Souter Bax and “Lord Sak”. Our hero, Baba Voss, is played by he-man of the hour Jason Momoa. He's a brickhouse of few words but with a huge cleaver always at his side. A reprise, essentially, of Momoa's old Game of Thrones bruiser, Khal Drogo, minus the rape and torture.

The blind literally lead the blind in Voss’s remote mountain kingdom. And yet humanity has strategised its way around mass disability. “Scentiers” with super-powered olfactory nerves sketch out the lay of the land (sneaky blinders, as they should have been called). And as Momoa’s character demonstrates in one of many gory fight scenes it is possible to overcome visual impairment by…scraping your sword along the floor.

The technique presumably creates sonic feedback, allowing Voss construct a visual map in his mind. See had a blindness consultant on set and one of the cast, Marilee Talkington, is legally blind (she has expressed the wish that more visually impaired actors were cast, saying portraying blindness cannot be “taught”).

Yet none of that is really delved into in the first three episodes. Nor does See initially shed light on how the enigmatic Jerlamarel came to be born with normal vision and to have twins by Baba Voss’s partner Maghra (Mortal Engines’s Hera Hilmar).

Maghra claims to have met Jerlamarel in “a storm” – a euphemism, presumably – shortly before taking up with Baba Voss and his community. The presence of twins with the power of sight, eventually portrayed as teenagers by Archie Madekwe and Nesta Cooper, naturally does not remain secret for long. Voss and his crew soon attract the unwelcome attention of paranoid Queen Kane, who lives in the ruins of a hydro-electric dam.

As the wicked Kane, Sylvia Hoeks is fully plugged into the Game of Thrones vibe. She slinks around wearing a spiky crown, oblivious to the fact, as nobody can see, the royal headgear is redundant. Meanwhile she communes with her god by – and I wish there was another way of way of putting it– purposefully patting herself down under.

What unintentional comedy is this? Knight and Lawrence were presumably shooting for Westeros levels of transgressive cool. But as push comes to rub in the Queen’s boudoir we’re whisked off to a land beyond parody. Not that we weren’t already en route, thanks to an early set-piece in which Voss and his warriors clash with forces commanded by the Queen’s Witchfinder General (blind as a bat with a sack over its head yet clopping about on a warhorse).

With heroes and villains dashing about swinging weapons, everyone appears to forget they are supposed to be portraying blind characters. We also meet a “shadow”, covered in white body paint and who creeps around listening in on everyone. Here is a high-octane oddball Noel Fielding might have played in his grotesque comedy days.

It’s just one weave in a vast tapestry of inanity. Apple has amassed billions cornering the market in gorgeous gadgets. Perhaps it should stick to what it’s best at. See suggests that, when it comes to prestige television, it can’t yet see the crud from the trees.