Apple TV+: the best TV series to watch
Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney Plus: You have probably already seen almost all of the coolest TV series available on these three platforms. That’s why today, together with the real expert Matthew, who is calling himself Mattedamus these days (you can find out why inepisode 8 of the Freaking News podcast), I want to suggest the best five TV series (plus a bonus one) featured on Apple TV+.
SEO introduction done. Let’s get the binge watching started!
Ted Lasso
Could an American soccer coach ever coach a Premier League team, the most competitive soccer league in the world? Here, Ted Lasso tries to give an answer to this unlikely and rather fanciful question. Apple Tv’s series is soccer, it is passion, it is resilience and the spirit of adaptation, but it is also a comedy built around well-delineated and in-depth characters who are impossible not to become attached to. Finally, it is also a drama because the family life of Jason Sudeikis, co-creator of the series with Bill Lawrence, will split your heart in two. Not surprisingly, he won the 2021 Golden Globe (here all the winners at the 2023 Golden Globes) for best leading actor in a comedy series. More generally, Ted Lasso took home several awards including Best Comedy at the Emmys in 2021 and 2022.
Ted Lasso currently has two seasons and the third is scheduled for this 2023. Soccer seen and told through a different eye, from the point of view of its protagonists – from the management to the ball boy of the team-and their intimate, everyday stories. This combination makes the Apple Tv series one of the best dramedies in the current TV landscape.
For all mankind
For All Mankind reinterprets in an uchronic key everything the post-allusion audivisual created in Hollywood, from First Man to Hidden Figures, from the masterpiece Real Men to Apollo 11, starting of course with the‘inescapable 1989 documentary by Al Reinert. (from which it also takes its title), and in its serial development it is exciting because of the concept it exploits and the ways it tells the story.
Surprisingly, in fact, the ultimate source of inspiration behind the story would seem to be none other than Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s legendary boxer who embodied a certain way of thinking ‘American-style’ and who, in constantly finding the strength to get back up after defeat, managed to inspire his nation. Similarly. For All Manking makes the U.S. lose the race to the moon to the Soviet Union, in this fictional universe the first man on the lunar surface is a communist, and so here is Rocky’s nation, defeated and humiliated, doing what Rocky did best: rolling up his sleeves and getting busy.
In this context, while enjoys re-reading history and its technological and social advances (in the 1980s, the setting of the second season, we already have a colony on the Moon and Mars is the next target, much to the chagrin of Elon Musk), looks into the lives of astronauts, scientists and bureaucrats by showing NASA’s human side, idealism and compromises, with moving choices and Truly human characters described with great accuracy by a phenomenal cast.
If you want just one reason to subscribe to the platform, For All Mankind gives you three, one for each season: and hurry up, because the fourth is coming soon.
Servant
The king of the twist-not the dance, but the twist-this time he makes the twist the centerpiece of the narrative and no longer a move, a disorienting dance step: appearance, pretense, deception, illusion, in Servant become the only realities to believe in, while M Night Shyamalan and his directors – including Julia Ducournau as well as the daughter of the great paranormal author, Ishana Night Shyamalan – in loud and intrusive close-up shots seem to Wanting to rewrite the rules of the small screen game, exaggerating with formats, experimenting with technological equipment and their digital eyes, deforming images and faces, cutting out pictures within pictures composed with manic attention.
Along with WandaVision perhaps the most deconstructionist and theoretical television product of the new television era, terribly conscious of its status and seemingly motivated by a precise mission of iconoclasm whose evolution becomes a pleasure for the eye to follow.
Splitting
Last year I did not follow it from the beginning and caught up with it long after its original release, intrigued by more or less distinguished colleagues whom I follow daily between online and print magazines, and who both in print and on desktop had discomfited terms such as ‘masterpiece and various and any synonyms-
You already know how it ended, because a few weeks ago. Splitting you found it mentioned in our piece on the best series of 2022 and I was even invited on the radio, on the program The Seventh Obsession, to talk about it: the idea behind the premise-which we don’t want to anticipate, but that the series will make you understand in the first ten minutes of the first episode – is brilliant, the kind you’ll never forget and that pushes the possibilities of high science fiction a little further, from the parts of Lost and Devs, and Ben Stiller (director and producer) was able to set it up as a a matryoshka of looks and points of view, all in conflict with each other.
A full season already available, with a sequel on the way.
Slow Horses
Dark spy drama with subtle (and sometimes flatulent) humor based on the series of novels of the same name penned by Mick Herron.
The story follows A team of British intelligence officers who serve in the worst of the worst of MI5 departments, known not so affectionately as ‘Slough House,’ the hellhole to which spies are sent because of mistakes that have (almost) ended their careers: Oscar-winner Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, the brilliant but irascible leader of Britain’s worst agents, and leads a cast that includes Academy Award nominee Kristin Scott Thomas, BAFTA Scotland Award winner Jack Lowden, Academy Award nominee Jonathan Pryce, and also-among others- House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke.
Already two seasons under its belt, with a third and fourth immediately ordered by Apple and coming soon.
Bonus: Pachinko
This series should also be vaguely familiar to you, dear loyal readers (and listeners) of Freaking News, since we mentioned it several times a few weeks ago when talking about the best TV series of 2022.
Project possible only after Parasite’s successes and the ultrapop phenomenon Squid Game, Pachinko (which takes its title from a very famous gambling game in Korea) is of those rare television ventures, with a disproportionate budget (and fundable only for streaming giants) and, for once, really exploited to the last penny For the purpose of pursuing and realizing the grandeur: with the broad, flowing afflatus of Mo Yan’s historical novels, the story covers almost the entire twentieth century and spans the various generations of a Korean family.
There is a dialogue with our present because it starts with an invasion-that of Korea by Japan-there is the economic rampantism of the 1980s, there is acting in three languages, and there is traveling between eras with a balancing act that has something miraculous about it. Credit to Kogonada, who directed four of the total eight episodes and imposed style and atmosphere on fellow director Justin Chon (director of the recent and forgettable Blue Bayou, who directed the other four episodes instead): together with showrunner Soo Hugh, who Adapted the novel ‘The Korean Wife’ by Min Jin Lee, the two directors impress with the sumptuousness of the historical fresco staged, and if Kogonada has always been a director of space, here he becomes one of timing as well, finding In Soo Hugh’s screenplays that emotional richness. That perhaps has always been lacking in his films.
He, who has always been a superficial filmmaker (in the literal sense of the word: his films-two to date, Columbus and the recent After Yang, excluding the many video essays that made him famous-have always been interested in surfaces, in architectures, To spaces and the spaces between people, rather than to people and their spaces) with Pachinko perhaps doubly surprising, because it not only demonstrates once again the production overkill of Apple TV+ (here perhaps at its peak so far) but simultaneously also poses As an end point for the evolution of his thought – sign that the small screen, today, is more central to the industry than ever before, even from a creative perspective).
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