Best TV shows on Apple TV+

This drama is based on a novel by Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth — but Wharton’s last book was unfinished when she died in 1937, which means liberties can be taken…

The story of American debutantes disrupting the social scene in 1870s London emerges at first as a frothy affair, but it’s not quite as light as it seems in the opening, which plays like a cross between Bridgerton and a 1980s pop video.

Kristine Froseth leads the wild young things as Nan, with Christina Hendricks, Fenella Woolgar and Amelia Bullmore playing tutting, scheming grown-ups.

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Apple TV+’s The Essex Serpent is that rare, mythical beast: an adaptation that feels just as compelling as its celebrated source material.

Based on Sarah Perry’s bestselling book, the series stars Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston and is set in Victorian England. Danes is heartbreakingly wonderful as Cora Seaborne, a recently widowed amateur naturalist who relocates to Essex to investigate rumours of a monstrous serpent. Meanwhile, the series is beautiful to look at, in particular, the evocation of the bleak - but bewitching - wintry landscape Cora finds there.

Flora Carr

A solid three-part documentary looks back at the murder in 1980 of John Lennon, assembling an impressive array of people who directly witnessed the crime and its aftermath, plus startling archive footage of the reaction on US TV news. After episode one, the focus is on the criminal investigation and the question of whether the gunman, Mark Chapman, was mentally robust enough to stand trial.

That’s not a story that amounts to very much, but it’s comprehensively told.

Jack Seale

It’s already one of the most well-chronicled cases of the possibly supernatural, but this docuseries offers fresh chills thanks to its unsettling conceit. In a re-creation of that notorious north London house, actors lip-sync to recordings made by paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse, who captured hundreds of hours of audio footage while in the company of the Hodgsons, victims — as they claimed in the late 1970s — of poltergeist activity. The whole thing has a strange, uncanny air.

David Brown

A bewitching, beguiling drama, not least because it takes a long time before we understand exactly what we’re watching.

In New York in 2010, shy bookworm Apollo (Lakeith Stanfield) experiences love at first sight in a library, but his romantic story will not be a straightforward one. While that narrative gradually introduces disturbing, possibly supernatural elements, we go back to the 1960s and 70s, where Apollo’s mother Lillian (Adina Porter) lives through her own imperfect version of marriage and parenthood in a city where something always seems to be moving in a dark corner nearby.

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From the late 1980s to mid-90s, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell ruled the roost as supermodels. They all came of age together in the fashion industry and in this four-part series are candid about their humble beginnings and big breaks. But the series doesn’t shy away from the less savoury aspects of the business, also reflecting on events in a post-#MeToo, post-Black Lives Matter landscape.

With contributions from designers Donatella Versace and Michael Kors, photographers Arthur Elgort, Martin Brading and Peter Lindbergh, plus Vogue trailblazers Grace Coddington and Edward Enninful, it’s an illuminating must-watch for any fashion faithful.

Laura Rutkowski

In 2018, Carlos Ghosn, the then CEO of Renault and Nissan, was arrested in Japan on suspicion of financial fraud. One year later, having been granted bail, he made an audacious escape: hiding in a box and arranging to have it smuggled out of the country.

This gripping four-part series recounts the events leading up to his flight. It paints a portrait of a mogul who managed the impossible in turning around the fortunes of two enormous car companies, before allowing himself to be consumed by greed. Of course, the man himself doesn't see it that way.

Stephen Kelly

The first series of this lavish science-fiction show chronicled the discovery - and subsequent invasion - of a mysterious alien fleet, through the eyes of ordinary people around the world. It's an intriguing concept, albeit one that proved too ponderous and slow, stretching out the inevitable invasion until breaking point.

This action-packed premiere of season two rectifies that. The highlight is Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna). Fresh from fighting gnarly little spider aliens in Japan, she is brought to Brazil in the hope that she can commune with a downed alien ship. The twist is that the ship causes brain damage, meaning that she could emerge "not knowing your mother's face".

Stephen Kelly

This idiosyncratic ten-part animation is based, with admirable care and fidelity, on Nathan W Pyle’s webcomic and graphic novel. Blue-skinned aliens adhere to human behaviours and lifestyles while reflecting on the inexplicable bizarreness of much of them through rigorously technical and literal analysis of emotions. Despite these outsider insights, it is suffused with warmth and unexpected perceptiveness (the involvement of Community creator Dan Harmon feels key here), beginning with a gently thorough dissection of air travel before moving on to the impact of a band break-up.

It’s cutely whimsical rather than hilarious, but unarguably singular.

Gabriel Tate

Don’t you hate it when this happens? You and your ruthless crew have meticulously planned your gunpoint hijack of an airplane full of British TV character actors, but it turns out there’s one guy on board with a particular set of skills… Idris Elba is that man in a thriller that has enough smarts in its scripting and direction (by the versatile George Kay and Jim Field Smith, who also did Litvinenko, Criminal and Stag) to overcome the cliches of the genre, and which heightens the enveloping tension of the story by telling it in real time. So what exactly are those skills that Sam Nelson (Elba) has, which might foil the plans of a gang of criminals led by a typically intense Neil Maskell? Finding out will make you want to crash straight on into episode two.

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It's best to watch this drama without knowing anything about it - don't look up what the book it's based on is about, for example. New York, 1979: a troubled-looking man called Danny and his female friend track another man through central New York. Then the woman fires a gun at the man and disappears, leaving Danny to face the authorities. In conversation with a criminal psychologist (Amanda Seyfried), Danny recounts his life story, which we see in flashback. Suffice to say that Holland has taken on a bigger acting role here than you might initially think.

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Reuniting the stars and director of the 2014 movie Bad Neighbours, this new romantic-ish comedy plays like the first half-hour of a romcom film extended across a series. Rose Byrne is Sylvia, a bored California mother and housewife who reconnects suddenly with her old friend Will - played by Seth Rogen, which indicates he's going to be something of a slobby wildcard. As they start to hang out, however, it's clear that Sylvia is as irresponsible and unpredictable as her old buddy is, and their new adventures are going to majorly disrupt her family life. Do Will and Sylvia actually love each other? There are a lot of cheeky, semi-improvised laughs before you need to worry about that.

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The much-hyped 2015 novel upon which this crime drama is based was steeped in the New York of the 1970s. But here the mystery is transplanted to 2003 and injected with post-9/11 angst. The central conceit, though, remains the same, as we chart the fallout from the shooting of an NYU student in Central Park on those in her orbit. They’re a disparate bunch of anarchists, edgy musicians and wealthy high rollers whose secrets are revealed against a backdrop of mysterious city-wide arson attacks.

David Brown

This drama has the patience and stylistic flair to carry off one of the more unusual narratives you’ll see this year. Fleur Geffrier is Camille, a Parisian author whose writer’s block stems from her unusual childhood: her father, a globally renowned wine guru, intensively trained her nose and palette, but then abandoned the family and has been estranged ever since, living in Japan and leaving his daughter with an aversion to alcohol. When he dies, Camille has to relocate, and re-kindle her gift for wine appreciation, to claim her inheritance and find her path in life. It sounds absurd but it’s elegant and compelling.

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A natural history programme that has a very simple unique selling point: it's introduced and narrated by David Attenborough and it looks and sounds just like any other wildlife programme, but it's about dinosaurs. Stunning CGI footage combines with the latest palaeontological research to hazard an educated guess at how various species would have lived, before rendering it in images that are virtually indistinguishable from film of real animals.

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A fascinating character during his sporting career and and even more sensational prospect since, German tennis superstar Boris Becker is a rich subject for a documentary profile like this one. Interviewees including John McEnroe, Novak Djokovic and Bjorn Borg discuss a player who enjoyed an incredible ascent as a teenager and then a rapid decline later on, and a man whose personal and financial troubles have led to notoriety and more than one serious brush with the law. The reasons for all the above are made a little clearer.

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A kids’ drama “inspired by the mission of Dr Jane Goodall” joins in with the adventures of nine-year-old Jane (Ava Louise Murchison), whose ordinary days living in an ordinary apartment with her mother are enlivened by the girl’s keen imagination and passion for protecting the environment. Accompanied by Greybeard, the cuddly toy Jane imagines is a real chimp, she pictures herself meeting the animals she wants to save: in episode one there’s a polar bear on the loose! It’s a wholesome way to teach older primary-schoolers about conservation, climate change and the actions individuals can take to make the world better.

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From one of the writers of Schitt’s Creek, this quirky take on the midlife crisis dramedy confirms Apple TV+ as a home for unusual, experimental fictional series. Chris O’Dowd is Dusty, a genial history teacher in a small town. On his 40th birthday, the local shop acquires a mysterious machine that claims to divine your “life potential”, ie the one thing you fundamentally are and should be.

It’s a nimble but dark-hearted story about how to learn to be happy with your little lot, and whether you should.

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A climate-catastrophe satire set among raging wildfires in 2037 isn’t likely to be a lot of fun, but this drama sweetens its furious message with nicely worked human drama with an incredibly starry cast, including Meryl Streep. As governments hold yet another environment summit to rubberstamp a further creep towards oblivion, Kit Harington’s conflicted billionaire and Matthew Rhys’s crazed property developer – the latter looking to cash in on new land revealed by melting glaciers – are in the centre of a network of small, interlocking stories, all on the theme of personal advancement versus collective good. The moral is strong but the storytelling is intriguing, too.

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Reese Witherspoon and Kacey Musgraves are among the executive producers of a relaxed, friendly talent hunt that wants to find a new country music superstar. Its big selling point is the diversity of contestants: it’s fascinating, in the first episode, to hear what amateur enthusiasts from India, South Africa and Mexico do with a genre of music that can sometimes conform to a narrow sonic template. The show spends rather a lot of time on the contestants’ back stories and perhaps not enough letting them sing, but when they do there are performances worth waiting for – or at least, worth skipping to the last 15 minutes to hear.

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As they rapidly expand, streaming platforms feel able to take a risk now and then – with projects like this genuinely odd drama. It’s set in what seems to be America in the 1950s, but it’s a version of it where cars hover, typewriters can take dictation and service personnel have been replaced by robots. We follow a team of salespeople, led by a luminously charming Billy Crudup, selling homes and timeshares on the Moon – but all is not well. Like a retro-future Mad Men, the show riffs on the hope offered by postwar commercialism, doing so with acid wit and an elegantly heavy heart.

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You can always rely on M Night Shyamalan to give you the heebie-jeebies and that’s exactly what he does with Servant – an Apple TV Plus psychological horror series. When wealthy couple Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell) lose their 13-week-old son and Dorothy suffers a psychotic break as a result, they bring in a life-like reborn doll, which she treats like an actual child, to help her adjust to the loss. When they decide to hire young nanny Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) to take care of the fake child, Sean begins to notice strange and supernatural events happening around the house.

With Rupert Grint starring as Dorothy’s younger brother, this creepy thriller is the perfect watch for fans of The Visit, Split, The Sixth Sense and The Village. And there's a lot to enjoy - series 4 has recently arrived.

Sometimes you just need a bite-sized portion of honest, hopeful, human drama: settle in with this delightful US anthology. Each episode is based on the real experience of an immigrant to the States, or their children, and they tend to be quietly extraordinary rather than unbelievably spectacular. The first instalment in the new, second season concerns an unlikely friendship between the precocious son of a Korean milliner and his favourite Detroit radio presenter, a woman who’s a connoisseur of soul, gospel and fine hats. You’ll cry a happy tear.

Jack Seale