So far, the Apple TV+ shows affiliated with Oprah Winfrey (or approved by her) represent some of the streaming service’s safest offerings. And her spirit, to say nothing of her face, is all over the inspiring series Dear…

Each episode focuses on a single celebrity and the moving fan letters they receive highlighting the star’s impact on regular people. A such, it takes the form of part-biography, part-tribute to its famous subjects.

Dear… certainly does not stand out as one of the most hard-hitting journalistic exercises you’ll see. But as puff pieces go, the episodes prove both persuasive and reasonably inspiring. The show plays like a MasterClass with lessons about community building and standing up for yourself.

Apple TV+ secured another handsomely produced, blandly pleasant, absolute mediocrity when it purchased Bryce Dallas Howard’s feature documentary debut, Dads. What’s Dads about, you ask? Why dads, of course. Next question.

Up until now, Apple TV+ hasn’t been the most cautious content provider. Apple execs lavished money on a lot of utter nonsense with enormous price tags because they seemed to aesthetically fit in with the rest of the company’s design scheme. Home, Central Park, See — none of them are good television, but they’d look good testing TVs on a showroom floor, which seems to be the prevailing ethos for a lot of the Apple TV+ purchases.

Dads, released Friday just in time to remind you to forget Father’s Day, is much the same and quite a bit less.

Breakout Apple TV+ series Defending Jacob comes to a gutsy and strong conclusion by leaving its characters, and its audience, in the lurch. This is the smartest decision the show’s creators could have made.

The limited series’ ending, which premieres Friday, shifts everything we’ve seen so far into an entirely new light. It likely will haunt you for some time to come.

Spoiler alert: Details about “After,” the final episode of Defending Jacob, follow.

Despite an impressive pedigree and a marketable cast, new Apple TV+ show Central Park seems primed to annoy as many people as it will please.

You must put up with an awful lot of very trendy singing and songwriting, and an overly precious approach to character and plotting, to get to the meager delights within.

Defending Jacob closes in on its shocking and horrible conclusion this week. It’s been clear for a while that things will never get straightened out fully for the Barber family after Jacob’s murder trial. Whether the teen lands in jail or not, things will end badly.

The Apple TV+ crime drama’s seventh episode, titled “Job,” proves this in spectacularly agonizing fashion.

Apple TV+ crime drama Defending Jacob nears its climax in Episode 6. The writers crank up the tension and the danger in ways that finally take the series out of the ordinary and into the more obviously fictional and generic.

Thankfully, director Morten Tyldum knows how to handle a flagrant crime show incident without it seeming more overblown than the series can handle. (Spoiler alert: Some key plot details will follow.)

Things start to get unbearably tense and inhumane as pressure builds on the Barber family in Defending Jacob’s fifth episode, “Visitors.” The show takes a number of risks that may pay rich dividends in future episodes — as long as the showrunners remember not to flinch.

New guest stars — including veteran actor J.K. Simmons — and old vendettas surface in Friday’s new episode. And the Barbers head toward what might turn out to be a moral dead end if they want to stop their son, Jacob, from going to prison. Can we say climax?

In its fourth episode, stellar Apple TV+ show Defending Jacob shows every member of the Barber family starting to crack as young Jacob moves closer to his murder trial. As the characters head toward revelations and uncomfortable conclusions, they start to stall for time in irresponsible, sometimes dangerous ways.

As the situation unfolds, their relationships with each other start to fray.

Even during quarantine, you’d really need to not value your time to look beyond the failures of imagination at the heart of Trying. The new Apple TV+ sitcom, created by Andy Wolton and starring Rafe Spall and Esther Smith as a couple who discover they can’t conceive, is sitcom 101.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with the premise, but neither is there much to recommend it. Wolton and company seem content to do the bare minimum.

With a hot cast and a true-crime sheen, Defending Jacob is one of the most highly anticipated Apple TV+ series so far. It’s based on a best-selling novel. It’s helmed by an Oscar-nominated director. And the first three episodes arrived Friday, primed for a literally captive audience seeking its latest obsession.

Apple calls its fledgling streaming service “the new home for the world’s most creative storytellers.” And for the first time, Apple TV+ has delivered a show that lives up to the hype — at least judging by the first three episodes.