What to Watch on Apple TV+: The Best Shows and Movies Worth Your Time

The prestige dramas that built the reputation

Severance is the show that turned Apple TV+ from a curiosity into a destination. Its premise, a group of office workers whose memories are surgically split between work and home, sounds like a gimmick and plays like a slow-burn nightmare. The production design is immaculate, the paranoia is earned, and the second season doubled down on everything that made the first one talked about.

For a different register, The Morning Show trades in glossy, high-wattage melodrama about the people who anchor America's news. Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon anchor a cast that keeps expanding, and the show is at its best when it stops pretending to be tasteful and lets the knives come out. It is prestige soap opera, and it knows it.

Slow Horses is quietly the most consistent drama on the platform. Gary Oldman plays the head of a dumping ground for disgraced British spies, and each compact season adapts one of Mick Herron's novels with wit, grime, and real stakes. If you want to know what the best Apple TV Plus shows do well, watch how efficiently this one moves.

Comedy that actually holds up

Ted Lasso is the crossover hit, the show your relatives who do not usually talk about streaming have probably mentioned. Its story of an American football coach hired to run an English soccer club could have been one joke stretched thin. Instead it turned into a warm, occasionally sad meditation on kindness that earned its sentiment more often than not.

Shrinking, from some of the same creative hands, follows a grieving therapist who starts breaking the rules with his patients. Jason Segel and Harrison Ford make an unlikely, very funny pair, and the show handles loss without ever getting maudlin about it.

If your taste runs stranger, Mythic Quest is a workplace comedy set at a video game studio, and it is sharper about creative ego and office politics than most shows that take themselves seriously. Its one-off bottle episodes are among the best half-hours Apple has produced.

The Apple TV Plus movies worth a night in

Apple made its intentions clear when CODA won Best Picture, the first streaming film to do so. It remains an easy recommendation, a coming-of-age story about a hearing daughter in a deaf family that hits its emotional marks without cheapening them.

Beyond that, the film slate leans toward directors with real vision. Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon is a long, patient, devastating look at the Osage murders, anchored by Lily Gladstone. Napoleon gave Ridley Scott a canvas for his taste for spectacle. These are not disposable streaming movies. They are films that also happened to land here.

The service also fields sharp genre work and documentaries, so the movie shelf rewards browsing. Apple TV Plus movies tend to be fewer in number than the competition, but the average quality is high enough that a random pick rarely disappoints.

The underrated picks worth a click

For All Mankind imagines an alternate history where the space race never ended, and it quietly became one of the best long-running dramas anywhere. Each season jumps forward a decade, so the ambition compounds as the timeline diverges further from our own.

Silo is lean, claustrophobic science fiction about thousands of people living in an underground bunker who are forbidden from asking why. It is a mystery box done with restraint, which is rarer than it should be. Pachinko, adapted from Min Jin Lee's novel, spans generations of a Korean family with a scope and sensitivity that most prestige TV only gestures at.

On the lighter side, The Studio is a fast, self-aware Hollywood satire that lands its punches, and there is a steady stream of well-made limited series for viewers who prefer a story that ends when it should.

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