Best TV shows on Apple TV+

This stylish psychological thriller is in the business of disrupting lives of seeming perfection, specifically the one being led by Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), an acclaimed TV documentarian with a history of exposing misdeeds, who discovers she’s the lead character in a novel that reveals her own deepest, darkest secret.

The publication is a precision-tooled act of revenge on the part of Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline, armed with a faultless English accent), a former teacher who blames Catherine for his unhappy lot. But does he have the right target in his sights? Director Alfonso Cuarón, who’s also adapted Renee Knight’s 2015 bestseller, toys with this question over the course of these attention-grabbing opening two episodes, digging into such emotive issues as guilt and public shaming as he goes.

David Brown

Ingenuity and dark comedy collide in Apple TV+’s first German-language series. When 17-year-old Wanda goes missing, the Klatt family take matters into their own hands in the search for their daughter, launching an undercover surveillance operation and spying on their neighbours in a desperate attempt to find her.

Visually fresh, with arresting dialogue and amusing antics, it takes the traditionally dark missing-person drama and gives it a quirky, comic twist — a wry reminder that you never really know what’s happening behind closed doors.

Christopher Gooding

It’s hard to make a drama set on the Paris fashion scene and not have something visually stylish — and this French-language saga is suitably chic. The genius at the head of one of the city’s top couture brands cancels himself when he makes racist remarks about a client; is this the chance for his underlings to take over, or for his firm’s rival to swoop in?

There’s a soupçon of Succession to the dirty deals, but this is more emotional: everyone is in a fierce sibling rivalry or a clandestine affair. The intrigue makes up for a slightly slow pace. Lambert Wilson and Amira Casar are among the stars.

Jack Seale

In Mexico City, an underfunded ambulance service cannot keep up with the demand for emergency help from citizens. Imagine that! Stepping into the breach in this new drama (inspired by an award-winning documentary) are the Tamayo family who’ve invested in a private ambulance.

The dynamics of a family living through precarity are compassionately drawn and, with each patient providing a fresh drama of their own, the show’s energy never dips.

Jack Seale

This masterful, epic drama follows Korean exiles in wartime Japan, and the same family two generations later.

Each scene is profound and beautifully shot, but with the lightest of dramatic touches; and although the show is inspired by the experiences of Koreans who came to colonial Japan at the start of the 20th century and never left, its depiction of the immigrant experience — and of making one’s way in a world that can be harsh and confusing — is universally recognisable.

Jack Seale

If you love a good spy drama then this thrilling series could be for you. However, don't expect jet setting, lavish parties and nice suits - Slow Horses explores the other, murkier side of British intelligence. Centred around Slough House, a dumping ground department for MI5 agents who have committed career ending mistakes, this series has no shortage of star talent in front of the camera.

With the cast led by Gary Oldman, whose co-stars include Kristin Scott-Thomas, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke and Jonathan Pryce, the whole first season is a fast paced good time, which is unafraid to go dark but still injects a good dose of humour into the proceedings. A fourth season recently landed, so there's never been a better time to tune in. Plus, whenever Mick Jagger's original theme music for the series appears you'll be singing along every time.

Baltimore in the 1960s is the backdrop for an engrossing drama based on the book by Laura Lippman that has much more to it than just a murder investigation. Natalie Portman is Maddie Schwartz, a well-to-do housewife so disaffected by family life that she abandons it to look into two local killings, of a white girl and a black bartender.

Jagged timelines allow the bartender, played by Moses Ingram, to be a parallel main character in a show laden with a sense of disquiet and foreboding.

Jack Seale

When rookie FBI agent Scott Lawson was assigned to the Texan border town of Laredo he kept his expectations low. But, with local law enforcement seemingly powerless to tame Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, Lawson took a hunch and ran with it: why were successful “quarter horses” being sold to cartel-affiliated figures for bizarrely low sums?

The trail is a winding one, but Lawson proves a great storyteller and the supporting cast keeps this four-part series moving at a gallop.

Gabriel Tate

Terry Gilliam’s 1981 film adventure is rebooted in the hands of producers, co-stars and What We Do in the Shadows creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. Dorky, history-obsessed British kid Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) opens his wardrobe to find a time portal, through which he steps into the past — and joins a band of time-travelling thieves who are not very good at stealing stuff.

Lisa Kudrow is in her element as the group’s eccentric leader, and the show’s huge visual effects budget doesn’t stop it majoring on silly, quirky gags.

Jack Seale

These days, we tend to think of John Grisham as the king of the legal thriller, but back in the 1980s it was Scott Turow who ruled the courtroom, thanks to the suspenseful bestseller Presumed Innocent. Its story of a prosecutor put on trial for the killing of his mistress has made it to the screen before, in a rather dry 1990 movie starring Harrison Ford.

But this new version, with Jake Gyllenhaal as brooding lawyer Rusty Sabich, has more emotional depth — these first two episodes feel like a spiralling mid-life crisis wrapped in a gripping murder mystery.

David Brown

Eva Longoria, once of Desperate Housewives, brings spiky energy to an agreeable fish-out-of-water comedy drama. She’s Gala, a posh New Yorker who has to leave Manhattan pronto when it turns out her husband is in debt to gangsters. With her cynical teen daughter and incorrigible elderly mother (Pedro Almodóvar regular Carmen Maura) in tow, she flees to a small rural town in Spain, a place with significance in the family’s past.

The wine flows, the scenery glows, and bittersweet secrets are spilled as the initially bewildered locals begin to adjust to the brash new arrivals.

Jack Seale

Reality is about to get bent out shape for physicist college professor Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) who, after being attacked and knocked unconscious at night by a masked man, wakes in a life that is not his own. He’s no longer married to his artist wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and their son Charlie has never been born — in short, it’s the ultimate existential crisis.

Adapted from the inventive 2016 bestseller by Blake Crouch (who retains creative control over this TV version), what follows feels kind of like a sci-fi Sliding Doors with high-stakes chase scenes taking the place of romantic comedy as Jason gets to grips with nefarious and shadowy adversaries forcing him to travel down the roads not taken.

David Brown

Revolutionary politics is a serious business in a drama telling the true-ish story of how Black Panther leader Huey P Newton (André Holland) fled from America in 1974, via an elaborate plan concocted by red-hot film producer Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola): what looks like a film about an escape to Cuba is cover for the real thing.

The plan suffers from numerous setbacks and features a cast of oddball supporting characters, but the capering is offset by a diligent, slightly worthy examination of the experiences and injustices that made Newton so determined not to give in to the US authorities.

Jack Seale

Private investigator John Sugar (Colin Farrell) feels like a man out of time. His beat may be contemporary Los Angeles, but he very much draws on that mythic figure of hardboiled detective stories, Philip Marlowe.

Black-and-white fragments from Humphrey Bogart movies flash through Sugar’s mind, while world-weary voiceover narration settles like cigarette smoke from a bygone era over the 21st-century action. Why this stylistic device has been employed isn’t yet clear, but it’s a mystery that’s as diverting as the one that Sugar’s employed to solve — that of the granddaughter of a Hollywood mogul who has gone missing.

David Brown

Kristen Wiig is an interloper with nothing to lose in a richly styled dramedy: in Palm Beach, Florida in 1969, a group of middle-aged women rule the social roost from their perch at the exclusive Palm Royale members club. Maxine (Wiig) isn’t a member and has a murky, tenuous claim to being worthy of high society but she’s determined to sit at the top table. The show isn’t sure how malevolent or sympathetic it wants Wiig to be and it could do with being either sillier or more vicious — as it is, it’s a diverting enough swirl of secrets, schemes and gossip.

The cast, meanwhile, is a treat: Allison Janney raising a spiky eyebrow as the incumbent queen bee, Ricky Martin with his shirt off more than it’s on, and Laura Dern as a leader of an uncertain but growing feminist movement.

Jack Seale

Abraham Lincoln is one of American history’s most high-profile casualties, his killer John Wilkes Booth a name synonymous with assassination. What isn’t as well known is the story of the 12-day chase that followed the murder of the president, but this fast-paced seven-parter reveals what happened after the shooting.

On one side, there’s Anthony Boyle as the fugitive Booth, and on the other, Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) and his friend and war secretary Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), who personifies the pursuit. Swirling between them is the grim possibility of the Civil War reigniting…

David Butcher

Chocks are finally away on this epic drama that began shooting in 2021 and is rumoured to be among the most expensive ever made. Based on Donald L Miller’s book, it follows the men of the American Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group as they embark on some of the most dangerous bombing raids of the Second World War, hitting targets in Nazi Germany in broad daylight.

Like a lot of war epics, the opening episodes introduce a bewildering array of characters, but the cast — including Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Ncuti Gatwa and Barry Keoghan, some of whom are rather more famous now than they were when this was filmed — soon make us care about their fates. The aerial scenes, and the location shots, are spectacular. And for further viewing, don't miss documentary film The Bloody Hundredth about the people Masters of the Air was based on.

Jack Seale

The legend of the 18th-century English highwayman is fuel for a jolly period comedy that pitches itself somewhere between Horrible Histories and Our Flag Means Death. Noel Fielding is Dick, the son of a butcher who, in this telling, is a vegan who is reluctant to kill animals. Rejected by his father, he accidentally joins a gang of thieves before accidentally becoming their leader, which brings him to the attention of preening lawman Jonathan Wilde (Hugh Bonneville).

Some well-played silliness — such as the scene where Wilde reluctantly brings his misbehaving young son with him to work —and a great supporting cast make it a fun ride.

Jack Seale

Astronauts are exposed to sights those grounded on Earth wish they could see, but this genre-bending eight-parter asks us to question what it is that scientist Jo (Noomi Rapace) is witnessing. She’s on the ISS at the time of a disaster, but life soon proves terrifying when she finds she can no longer trust her own eyes.

Part sci-fi drama, part psychological thriller, the show’s aim is to spark debate about its ambiguities. Has Jo’s brain been starved of oxygen? Might she have been exposed to something? Could she be dead? Or is this all just some nightmare that Jo is experiencing while separated from loved ones? In space, no-one can hear you dream…

David Brown

The birth of modern fashion is recounted in a riveting, disquieting period drama that pulls together a cast as high-end as the fashion houses it chronicles.

In Paris 1955, Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) is overcome with anxiety ahead of a retrospective of his most famous designs (it’s here we get a scintillating morsel of the jaw-dropping costume that will later follow in this ten-part series). Meanwhile, Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) is 70 years old and speaking to the press about her comeback. “Print this: Christian Dior ruined French couture,” she scoffs. “And I’m coming back to save it.”

Their rivalry must wait, though. We soon wind back to 1943 and find both Dior and Chanel amid the brutality of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of the French capital. Here their threads are sparsely interwoven, but they’re both doing what they must to put their families first and survive. Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Maisie Williams and Claes Bang are among the stellar support.

Frances Taylor

Jason Segel stars in a comedy drama that has Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein on the writing team and Harrison Ford – yes, Harrison Ford! – in the supporting cast. Segel is Jimmy, a widowed therapist who, stuck in his own grief, throws the textbook aside and starts experimenting with brutal honesty in the treatment room instead.

The bittersweet catharsis it’s aiming for feels a bit forced but, as the damaged manchild at the centre, Segel winningly sells it.

Jack Seale

One of Apple TV Plus’s first original series, The Morning Show is an intense drama about the cut-throat world of breakfast TV, with Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell starring as the hosts of the titular network series.

When Alex Levy’s (Aniston) longtime co-host Mitch Kessler (Carrell) is fired over sexual misconduct allegations, she tries her best to keep her spot as the programme’s top dog despite the arrival of popular new anchor Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon), with whom she develops a rivalry. An Emmy-winning drama featuring hypnotic performances from its charismatic cast, The Morning Show is a flashy look at life as a breakfast TV host.

Given recent indictments of the Metropolitan Police, it would be naive for TV dramas to now portray all serving officers in the traditional manner as our saviours and protectors. So, I suspect the examination of prejudice within the force that we see in Criminal Record will be the first of many. But writer Paul Rutman (whose previous screen credits include Indian Summers and Next of Kin) has undoubtedly set the bar high with his urgent state-of-the-Met thriller, which pits a detective fresh to CID (played by Cush Jumbo) against a seasoned veteran (Peter Capaldi) who’s determined to protect his legacy.

The catalyst for bringing the pair into each other’s orbit is a desperate anonymous phone call that is soon found to have links to an old murder case. But with this discovery come questions about institutional failings, as well as crackling tension between the two series leads.

David Brown