Apple has taken a huge bite out of the Emmys, scooping a record-breaking 22 awards at the US television industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. Among the shows sweeping the boards were dystopian workplace drama Severance (eight Emmys), Seth Rogen’s The Studio, which bagged a blockbusting 13 gongs, and deadpan spy series Slow Horses winning another accolade for Outstanding Directing.
Victory at the awards will be regarded as a vindication of Apple’s big gamble, which has seen the tech giant spend $20 billion on original content since 2019. Admittedly, that investment has not necessarily brought in huge numbers of subscribers – especially in the UK – with its worldwide user base estimated at 45 million (compared to Netflix’s 301.6 million).
But the streamer’s quality threshold is very high, and it cannot be accused of churning out content just to give its audience something mindless to binge (as per the Netflix model). Rather than endless filler, Apple has become a powerhouse of superior TV, especially in science fiction and comedy.
Here are the 11 shows worth watching on Apple TV+:
Bad Sisters
Sharon Horgan’s adaptation of a hit Belgian dark comedy is set amongst the moneyed upper-middle classes of coastal Dublin – the sort who have Bono for a neighbour and whose lives are framed by beautiful views and spectacular bespoke kitchens. Add the murder of an abusive spouse, and you get Big Little Lies in the rain.
Horgan plays the eldest of five Garvey sisters, who are required to put aside their differences and work together following the suspicious death of their sibling’s abusive husband. Horgan is joined by a top-notch cast, including Anne-Marie Duff and Eve Hewson, who will have been perfectly at home in the moneybags Dublin milieu given that she is the daughter of none other than Bono.
The Studio
Comedies and dramas set in tinsel town can be self-aggrandising and full of insider humour that leaves the rest of us feeling like outsiders. Such pitfalls are avoided by The Studio, Seth Rogen’s hilarious love letter to Hollywood, but also to cinema itself – one episode is a tribute to film noir, filmed in the style of a 1940s crime flick, another touches on the danger of AI, while never being less than hilarious.
Rogen plays a flustered Hollywood executive whose ambition to make great art is frustrated by the financial demands of an industry that wants to pump out endless mindless franchises. The Studio is crammed with cameos – director Martin Scorsese is especially hilarious playing an exaggerated version of himself.
Pachinko
The idea that television is living through a golden age has been repeated so often that it is often taken as gospel. But there is one genre of drama that has fallen from favour – the sweeping melodrama that tells a grand story over time. Think 1970s favourite Roots or even Peter Flannery’s gritty 1990s drama Our Friends in the North.
That under-appreciated milieu lives again through Pachinko, a sprawling meditation on life and destiny that tracks four generations of a family as they move from Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century to modern Osaka in Japan. Moving back and forth across the decades, it is a moving portrait of familial bonds and a riveting drama to boot.
Shrinking
Now in his early 80s, Harrison Ford has lost none of his leading man magnetism as he plays a therapist and a person living with Parkinson’s disease in this wry comedy-drama set in a counselling centre.
He has excellent comedic chemistry opposite Jason Segel, who plays a colleague of Ford’s character, who is throwing himself into work as a way of avoiding his feelings over the death of his wife. That makes Shrinking sound pretty grim, but Segel and Ford are masterfully deadpan in a show about heavy subjects that has an endearing lightness of touch.
Loot
Maya Rudolph is a comedic powerhouse in this punchy dramedy about the newly divorced wife of a tech-bro billionaire. Forced to start over, she is surprised to discover she founded a charitable foundation several years earlier and promptly forgot all about it. Now, she reengages with the charity and, in so doing, tries to rediscover the person she was before she was seduced by a life of endless privilege.
The tone is quirky, but Loot has lots to say about hyper-wealth in America and the toxicity of tech bro culture.
Silo
At first glance, there is little remarkable about this future-shock thriller about a society that lives in a giant subterranean silo following a post-apocalyptic disaster. Adapted from Hugh Howey’s bestselling novel Wool, Rebecca Ferguson stars as an engineer who toils in the lowest level of the eponymous Silo. But when colleagues go missing after becoming a bit too inquisitive about the origins of their underground home, her curiosity is triggered – and she discovers the dark truth behind the official history of the silo.
The vibe is George Orwell by way of JG Ballard – but Silo is elevated by a great cast, led by that always watchable Ferguson and also featuring Rashida Jones, David Oyelowo and Tim Robbins as the sinister “head of IT”.
Black Bird
The late Ray Liotta received a posthumous Emmy nomination for his portrayal of the father of a small-time drug dealer (Taron Egerton) who is offered a second chance when arrested by the police.
The carrot is his freedom – but only if he convinces a convicted murderer (played by the outstanding Paul Walter Hauser, who won the Emmy Liotta was nominated for) to confess to the killing of a further 12 women, whose deaths have never been solved. Prison drama meets serial killer thriller in a remarkable tale based on a true story.
Foundation
Long regarded as the last word in unfilmable cult novels, Isaac Asimov’s science fiction saga is brought brilliantly to life by this ongoing Apple series. Displaying a healthy irreverence towards the source material, Foundation features a brilliantly unhinged Lee Pace as the Emperor of the Galaxy, a character who barely features in the books.
Pace makes the part – and the show – his own, as a space tyrant trying to hold together a crumbling space empire after nay-saying prophet Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) predicts the end is nigh.
Dickinson
This early Apple series showed that the streamer was ready to think outside the box. It stars Hailee Steinfeld as a young Emily Dickinson, the mysterious 19th-century poet acclaimed for her dark and minimalist verse.
Instead of the traditional biopic, Dickinson portrays its lead character as a thoroughly modern young woman navigating life and love in a time of peak patriarchy – all soundtracked by the anachronistic likes of Billie Eilish.
verance
The best science fiction has always used the future as a prism through which to interrogate the present day. Never has that been more true than in the case of Severance, a satire about employees at a groundbreaking biotech firm whose memories are wiped each day after work. Their “office” selves have no recollection of their life in the outside world – and vice versa.
It’s a fantastic metaphor for the Kafkaesque reality of the 21st-century workplace, where people are expected to leave their personalities to one side and become a soulless cog in a machine. As producer and director, Ben Stiller brings all his Hollywood experience, while Adam Scott is great as Mark, a lost soul who tries to erase personal pain by literally losing himself in his job.
Slow Horses
James Bond meets Ricky Gervais’ The Office in Apple’s fantastically withering adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels. Gary Oldman puts in a career-best performance as a slovenly secret agent put out to pasture in an MI5 unit reserved for weirdos and has-beens. Jack Lowden joins him as a once-promising young spy whose career has gone disastrously off the rails and Kristin Scott Thomas as their perpetually disapproving superior.
Workplace dramedy and international spy caper might seem like contradictions, but this underdog affair blends the two effortlessly.
