20 best shows to watch on Apple TV+ (March 2025)

Work sucks, but could it ever be so bad that you’d saw your brain in half in order to leave all memory of it at the office? Showrunner Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller have spun that hypothetical into the most compelling sci-fi thriller on TV. Adam Scott is a widower who undergoes a procedure to ‘sever’ his work and home lives, effectively volunteering half his consciousness as an indentured servant to the shady corporation that employs him — until outside forces compel him and his ‘innie’ coworkers to rebel. Suspenseful, surreal and satirical, it’s like Lost meets Office Space, throwing jabs at soulless corporate culture while asking big questions about love, memory and how we cope with the dissatisfaction of existence.

Imagine Entourage, only 90 percent less egregious, 70 percent funnier, and with the same number of Martin Scorsese cameos and you’ve got Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s state-of-Hollywood satire. And the state of Hollywood here? High on gummies and too caught up with whose car is in its parking spot to notice that the movie business is going to the wall. Rogen is hapless new studio head Matt Remick, who has to get a Kool-Aid movie made to satisfy his deranged boss (Bryan Cranston, on fire). Catherine O'Hara, Kathryn Hahn and Ike Barinholtz offer majestic support to his doomed quest for professional success and artistic fulfilment. 

The best thing on streaming? British espionage’s whisky-soaked waifs and schleppy strays would be too humble to boast, but this adaptation of Mick Herron’s spy novel series is right up there. Smartly plotted, gripping, caustically funny, ruthless when it needs to be, and with Gary Oldman’s spymaster Jackson Lamb as a kind of half-cut George Smiley with personal hygiene issues, it’s unputdownable TV. Another two seasons have been commissioned. We’d take ten.

Arriving in the dark days of 2020, this aggressively cheery sitcom provided the shot of serotonin everyone needed at the height of the pandemic. Starring Jason Sudeikis as an abnormally chipper American football coach inexplicably hired to lead a struggling Premier League franchise, it’s goofy and benevolent, with a message about battling cynicism with kindness. But it’s genuinely funny, too, finding a winning dynamic in its collision of midwestern folksiness with surly British soccer culture. Subsequent seasons got a tad too cheerful, but with Sudeikis signed on for another go, it’ll be a welcome return.

In a post-apocalyptic future, humanity has been shuttled underground, forced to live in a massive communal bunker, with little knowledge of its history, making them vulnerable to fascistic rule. Sound like typical dystopian sci-fi stuff? Perhaps. But this series, based on a trilogy of books by Hugh Howley, supports the twisty narrative with astounding visuals, and boasts a banger performance from Rebecca Ferguson as an engineer who begins to question everything she’s been told about her community’s past. 

By leagues the most visually ravishing series Apple TV has yet produced, this dramatic saga, adapted from a book by Min Jin Lee, traces decades in the lives of the Baek family, traveling from Korea to Japan to America, from the early 20th century through the 1980s. Generational epics are difficult to pull off, but Pachinko has some big talent on its side, namely visionary director Kogonada, who helmed several early episodes, and Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung, portraying matriarch Kim Sunja in her elder years. Despite its broad sweep, the focus is intimate, and the effect profound.

Therapists are people, too — which is to say, damaged, depressed and in need of therapy themselves. Created by Ted Lasso alums Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, this dramedy, starring Jason Segel as a psychiatrist struggling to cope with the sudden death of his wife, is equally earnest and empathetic, if more complicated emotionally. At heart, though, it’s a show about support systems, and the series itself has a great one, particularly Jessica Williams and the gleefully gruff Harrison Ford as fellow therapists, each of whom have issues of their own.

Intended as Apple TV’s flagship show a la House of Cards, The Morning Show hasn’t  seized the zeitgeist, but it did enough to establish the platform straight out the gate. Jennifer Aniston is the anchor of a morning news program who, over the course of three seasons, fights to maintain her position in the face of sexual misconduct allegations, COVID-19 and a tech takeover, not to mention clashes with rising reporter Reese Witherspoon and network CEO Billy Crudup. It’s more soap opera than hard-hitting media drama, but the less seriously it’s taken itself, the better it’s become.

Equal parts The Wire and Ozark, this gritty crime thriller brings Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel to the screen and invites you to follow it to some pretty dark and unexpected places. The Ridley Scott-directed pilot sets up the story: two low-level hoods (Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura) pose as DEA agents to knock off a remote stash house, only to stir up a vipers’ nest of criminals and actual undercover DEA agents (look out for a standout Kate Mulgrew). Moody, dank and relentless telly with a payoff that hits hard. 

It’s like someone reunited the Band of Brothers team – Spielberg, Hanks, writer John Orloff – gave them a big bag of money and asked them to remake Memphis Belle, ‘only really violent’. The result is not Top Gun: Maverick with propellers; this isn’t a story of grinning heroism with minimal cost. The true story of the US 100th Bomb Group in World War II is one of epic sacrifice, and it makes for shocking drama as the main characters fall from the skies over Nazi Germany. Will Austin Butler, Callum Turner and their fellow Hollywood hot shots survive the Luftwaffe, flak and assorted other perils to make it home? Don’t bet on it. 

A workplace comedy set in the video game industry was bound to happen, but thank the digital gods it came from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz, who truly seem to know the world they’re sending up, and do so without condescension. While skewing closer to the likes of Parks and Recreation than the scathing satire of Silicon Valley, its generally warm-hearted approach is never sentimental. 

What if the Soviets beat America to the moon and the Space Race continued ad infinitum? That’s the premise of this alternate-reality drama, which flashes forward through the decades as NASA scrambles to catch up, leading to international incidents on the lunar surface, daring space rescues and a colony on Mars, among other sliding-door moments slipped into the background (ie, John Lennon escapes assassination, Margaret Thatcher does not). While it’s become more of a sci-fi soap opera in recent seasons, it’s still a thrilling ride – and the science is pretty solid, too. 

Adapted from a Belgian series by Catastrophe’s brilliant Sharon Horgan, who also stars, this darkly comic thriller involves four Irish sisters who conspire to murder their other sibling’s bullying husband but struggle, mightily, to pull it off. When he finally does turn up dead, the ping-ponging timeline clouds the truth of what happened. But the crime-story plotting is really a device to explore familial bonds via Horgan’s exceptionally barbed wit. A second season wasn’t entirely necessary, but you can’t complain much about getting to spend more time with this clan.

Getting stuck in an alternate reality where everyone acts like they’re in a Hollywood musical is some people’s idea of hell, and indeed, the couple at the center of this fantastical satire aren’t exactly thrilled with their situation. Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key are big-city doctors with a shaky marriage who end up trapped in a magical realm whose cheerful residents won’t stop singing. (The second season takes place in a grittier land called Schmicago.) The songs are clever, the jabs at the genre are bang-on, and Broadway vets like Kristin Chenoweth and Ariana DeBose ensure the performances are top-notch.

Creepy dolls, anyone? In this chilling series, produced and occasionally directed by M Night Shyamalan, a Philadelphia couple (Lauren Ambrose and Toby Keppell) reeling from an unspeakable tragedy experiences strange phenomena after hiring a babysitter (The First Omen’s Nell Tiger Free) to look after their ‘child’: a hyper-realistic therapy doll resembling their recently deceased infant. Handsome as it is haunting, it’s the most genuinely unnerving project Shyamalan has been involved with in years.

There’s lots to enjoy about this richly-appointed historical thriller about the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, but the space it makes to take the piss out of actors is right up there. The actor in question – John Wilkes Booth (Masters of the Air’s Anthony Boyle) – wants to find fame for his stage work and does, though not how he intended, when he shoots the President at Ford's Theatre in 1865. With neo-noir directors John Dahl and Carl Franklin helping oversee his flight south and the pursuit by Lincoln’s old secretary of war, it’s a thrilling and fascinating evocation of a country trying to find conciliation from chaos.

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are a dream comic pairing in a comedy that puts a fresh spin on the old When Harry Met Sally… premise: can a man and a woman be friends if one of them is a pot-smoking microbrewer and the other one is an unfulfilled stay-at-home mum? The answer – yes, probably, with some major hiccups along the way – plays out in ten episodes full of big laughs, clever observations and honesty. The world has wisened up to Byrne’s comic superpowers, and between this and The Studio, Rogen is keeping Apple TV in throaty chuckles. Can we have that second series now, please?

Like Knives Out, this comic whodunnit simultaneously spoofs and celebrates the classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, then asks, ‘Why stop there?’ With the hilarious Tiffany Haddish as lead investigator, each episode presents that season’s crime from a new angle, only in the style of a different movie genre: romcom, action, costume drama, even animation. Silly? Yes. Gimmicky? Clearly. A ton of fun? With guest stars including Sam Richardson, Zach Woods and Ilana Glazer, how could it not be?

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in a murder-mystery that’ll keep even those familiar with the 1990 Harrison Ford/Alan Pakula thriller of the same name (and plot) invested. He’s a lawyer seemingly bang to rights for the brutal murder of his colleague and lover (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve). Did he do it? Will his wife (Ruth Negga) stand by him? And how does the legal system deal with one of its own standing in the dock? Showrunner David Kelley has been juicing the courtroom for fun and thrills since Ally McBeal and Boston Legal days and he’s delivered another prestige-y potboiler. 

This might be the year the world finally acknowledges the full breadth of Rose Byrne’s talent, but fans of this dark comedy have long known what she’s capable of. Set in the spandex-stretching ’80s, Byrne plays a housewife battling an eating disorder who finds an outlet in aerobics, which becomes a compulsion in itself. Sure, that doesn’t sound hilarious, and it’s certainly a tough watch at points. But Byrne’s bold performance carries all three seasons and makes the rough patches worth hanging through.