Someone put Stampede into development stat.
Photo: Apple TV+
An astonishing discovery was made on X this week. On July 15, one sharp-eyed poster, @boners, noticed that Apple TV+ seems to have an unusual affection for a particular letter of the alphabet. Specifically, its original-programming library includes 16 shows, two still in development, having one-word titles that start with the letter S. (I’m sure you can sound out a few off the top of your head: Sugar, Silo, Schmigadoon!)
It’s unclear what, exactly, this means. Has internal Apple TV+ data revealed that viewers respond best to single-world S titles? Are names like Stick just … stickier? Or is this some deep, unspoken quirk of Tim Cook’s personal taste? Whatever the case, it’s actionable intel for any showrunner hoping to land a pitch at the glossiest streamer in town. In that spirit, we offer you 43 S-title concepts to help get your juices flowing.
➼ Sunday: Light drama about a spaceship called the Sunday that sets off on a voyage of discovery. But after an encounter with a mysterious space phenomenon, the ship wakes up and becomes sentient AI with its own goals.
➼ Stuck: Dramedy centered on another middle-aged guy who’s down on his luck, starring either Seth Rogen or Jason Segel.
➼ Socks: Animated show for kids about a cat who has little socks. Two weeks after the premiere, the Beverly Cleary estate gives a saber-rattling interview with Deadline about IP infringement, followed by a two-paragraph press release 18 months later announcing a legal dispute has been settled out of court.
➼ Salvage: Dramatic miniseries about a woman reckoning with her trauma after she survives a canoeing accident.
➼ Selvedge: Six-episode limited dramatic series that will ultimately stretch into four seasons about an upstart purveyor in the Japanese-denim trade who goes missing, after which her mentor, an elder statesman of the community, risks his business, reputation, and life to get to the bottom of what happened.
➼ Sap: Sexy period drama following two rival maple-syrup empires as they engage in a decades-spanning struggle for superiority in 19th-century Vermont.
➼ Swipe: Sliding-doors multiverse dating dramedy.
➼ Swell: Comedy about a rich family who lose it all but learn to live better because of it. Set in an oceanside tourist community during the offseason. Not Schitt’s Creek.
➼ Swill: Historical drama about making whiskey, and obviously there are also murders.
➼ Swan: Thriller-toned sports drama about Olympic diving rivals in a vaguely Challengers-esque setup, but no one has any sex. In episode six, we discover one of them is an alien.
➼ SEALs: A goofy workplace sitcom set in the training center for the Navy’s finest prospects, with Don Johnson as the bumbling commanding officer.
➼ Sorry: An eight-part docuseries about cancel culture hosted by Jon Ronson.
➼ Stet: Fast-paced comedic drama about a copy editor at a lightly fictionalized version of the Free Press who falls for the D.C. bureau chief, an editor with shady ties to the presidential administration.
➼ Stout: Gritty drama adapting the famous and popular IP “I’m a little teapot.”
➼ Sunken: Thriller set in a deep-sea-mining station where someone turns up dead, and it’s either one of the crew members or something more sci-fi, and we don’t find out until way too late in the season.
➼ Shelley: Nick Mohammed’s solo Ted Lasso spinoff. After widespread viewer backlash to a Lasso-verse anti-hero drama, most viewers abandon Shelley within three episodes, which means the episode-nine time jump to a near-future climate-crisis story goes largely unnoticed.
➼ Sockeye: A cold, gloomy detective show about a murder in an Alaskan fishing town.
➼ Slay: Unbearable one-season attempt at a Gen-Z gay comedy set in San Jose, California, in which everyone works for not-quite-Apple.
➼ Sledgehammer: Gerard Butler is Morgan Sledgehammer. He uses a sledgehammer.
➼ Sacristy: Irish mockumentary series about altar boys.
➼ Synch: Zany mystery romp about a podcaster who unravels a political conspiracy with the help of her sidekick, a problematic pop musician.
➼ Suckers: Reality-competition show in which professional scammers compete to come up with the most insidious phishing scam.
➼ Sibelius: Off-kilter period drama about Finnish composer Jean Sibelius during the recording of his most famous work, Finlandia, with a midseason reveal that Sibelius is an alien brought to Earth to inspire humanity. (Four years later, Hulu orders a cult docuseries about a utopian commune in upstate New York that treats Sibelius as nonfiction.)
➼ Sears: Bio-drama about the family who started Sears-Roebuck.
➼ Sear: Drama centered on a celebrity chef who gets blackmailed for … reasons. We find out the reasons.
➼ Seer: Big-budget historical epic following the Trojan priestess Cassandra and her lover Apollo. Despite initial rumors that Nicole Kidman was interested in Cassandra, the role goes to Naomi Watts.
➼ Sore: Romantic comedy about a physical therapist and her professional-football-player patient. Ethical questions about patient-therapist boundaries do not come up in the early press junkets.
➼ Score: Hour-by-hour 24-esque miniseries about a liberal-arts student trying to buy Adderall.
➼ Sour: Candy-making competition show in the style of Is It Cake? Fan edits of participants licking the bottom of a realistic-looking shoe take over TikTok for four days, forcing host Elizabeth Banks to make a video reminding viewers not to lick real-life shoes.
➼ Shoreditch: A blatant rip-off of Skins.
➼ Singer: Cozy procedural featuring mushroom taxonomist Rolf Singer, who fights Nazis and solves mycological mysteries across war-torn Europe.
➼ Slimer: Heavily explanatory origin story of the Ghostbusters character that takes place in New York in the Roaring ’20s. (Slimer’s Place is a speakeasy.)
➼ Stuffed: Six-episode mockumentary about a middle-aged gay man who learns how to bottom.
➼ Slump: Hacks-esque comedy built around a mid-career TV actress who can’t get parts so she channels her job frustrations into baking. Surprise, she’s now famous! But will her dark past come back to haunt her?
➼ Sandman: Horror series about a monster made out of sand that puts its victims to sleep … permanently.
➼ Sandman: Docuseries about the career of Adam Sandler.
➼ Sequestered: Star-studded four-part limited series following members of the jury in a high-profile trial of a disgraced music mogul who end up in a hotel together for weeks. Interpersonal dynamics and shocking revelations about connections to the case throw the proceedings into disarray.
➼ Sodom: Edgy biblical epic about the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah. (No gay actors cast.)
➼ So …: Dialogue-heavy anthology series in which every episode begins mid-conversation.
➼ Sassy: Glossy reality series following an attempt to revive the titular magazine, produced by Hello Sunshine.
➼ Sardine: Cutting dramedy about ex–best friends and rival tinned-fish entrepreneurs who vie for dominance. Halfway through the first season, there’s an alien invasion.
➼ Stampede: Somber period drama about the aftereffects of a buffalo trampling on a tight-knit 18th-century community.
➼ Scapegoat: Magical-realist reality game show in which the contestant voted out is dressed in a goat costume and ritualistically driven from the villa.
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