★★★☆☆
Apple TV+ thriller Shining Girls takes a detour into the past to reveal the origins of serial killer Harper Curtis and the time-traveling house. It involves a broken friendship, a dead elderly couple, and more lies and betrayals.
Harper wasn’t always a maniac traveling through time killing whomever struck his fancy, though. He was once a lowly doughboy with no dreams and a crush. And then, power turned him evil.
★★★★☆
Now and Then, the new time-hopping Apple TV+ show about a group of friends who reminisce about youthful indiscretions as new mysteries present themselves, is a noirish riff on The Big Chill and Stephen King’s It.
The bilingual series, which premieres Friday, showcases a great cast doing ruthless character work. And the creative team includes prolific and highly successful showrunners and writers Ramón Campos, Teresa Fernández-Valdés and Gema R. Neira.
With so much talent on board, it’s easy to fall into Now and Then’s lithe setting, sexy milieu and casual backstabbing.
★★☆☆☆
Apple TV+ show Tehran puts its second-season plot in motion this week, but the Israeli espionage drama keeps making bizarre missteps in its pursuit of pulse-pounding thrills, twists and turns.
Manjar steps into Farraz’s home in the perfect disguise, Tamar tries out her new character, Milad almost screws everything up for all of them.
Everybody’s tense and everybody’s guilty, as usual. And Tehran continues to benefit from good performances, tight editing and solid music and sound design, which keep every nail-biting scene running efficiently. But is that enough to save the show from an increasingly blinkered perspective?
★★☆☆☆
Popular new Apple TV+ series Shining Girls keeps finding new clues to the identity of its time-traveling menace Harper. Meanwhile, Kirby and her reporter co-worker Dan get closer to breakthroughs — and further from normalcy — at every turn.
Kirby must ensure she doesn’t alienate everyone in her life just when she needs them most, even as she tightens the noose around Harper. Dan just needs to make sure Kirby doesn’t come across as an unreliable witness.
☆☆☆☆☆
Apple TV+’s most shameless cash grab is back for a truly unearned victory lap. Gotham Chopra and Co. have crafted the thoroughly un-asked-for second season of Greatness Code, the only show on TV about how great and talented athletes are.
Oh, what’s that? There are 10 million other shows about the same thing, and they’re all more involved than 10-minute interviews with competently animated interstitials and some vague notion of what makes an athlete “great”?
Well shut my mouth. Guess there’s no reason to watch this one, is there?
★★★★☆
The Essex Serpent is Apple TV+’s first foray into folk horror and a welcome return to BBC-style costume dramas. Based on the book by Sarah Perry, and starring Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston, this series holds a lot of promise in its deviously clever premise.
Shepherded by writer Anna Symon (Dark Matters: Twisted But True, Deep Water) and director Clio Barnard (The Arbor, The Selfish Giant), the series’ excellent production design and game cast make The Essex Serpent appointment television. You can watch the first two episodes Friday on Apple TV+.
In this week’s intense installment of Shining Girls, Kirby finds the clue to her killer’s identity and Dan dries out long enough to have an epiphany of his own. The only question is, can they stop Harper before he kills again, or fundamentally alters their reality?
The new time-traveling murder mystery on Apple TV+ finally finds it footing in an investigation-heavy fourth installment.
When Apple TV+ spy thriller Tehran returns Friday, the show picks up right where it left off after its taut first season. Mossad agent/hacker Tamar’s crimes catch up with her as she waits for extraction from Iran. And humbled Revolutionary Guards chief Faraz is still seething over his seeming defeat by Mossad, with the eyes of the Iranian government on him.
The spy-on-spy action remains good, but Tehran is playing a dangerous game in dramatizing the Iranian government as the greater of two evils. I’m hoping there’s a little more lip service paid to the idea that, though Iran is the villain on this show, Israel is the aggressor. It’s something the show forgets when convenient.
Apple TV+’s latest documentary series The Big Conn is a too-earnest, too-cute look at the biggest scandal to ever hit the Social Security Administration.
The story is fascinating and filled with interesting people. But the approach taken represents the very worst tendencies of modern nonfiction. That includes its four-episode run time, which could easily have been tightened to a single movie.
Ultimately, there’s something a little crass about making a documentary about fraud that jukes every scene until it’s two minutes too long, just to make sure it meets a series order.
Apple TV+ spy thriller/comedy Slow Horses crosses the finish line of its fine first season this week. The show horses chases down its kidnapping rogues as Lamb gains the upper hand, and Taverner gets desperate. The last-minute rescue operation comes down to blind luck, determination, and no small amount of heroic stupidity.
The show’s efficient plotting and knee-deep characterizations pay off in a desperate last act that uses every agonizing second to its advantage. The show makes a strong case for its next season — and for its own place in the roster of the best Apple TV+ shows yet.
In the season one finale of Pachinko, we see the beginnings of some life journeys and the end of others. Birth, rebirth, death, imprisonment and hope all mingle freely in Friday’s very captivating episode of this incredible show about four generations of Korean immigrants.
Series creator Soo Hugh and her creative team spin one last yarn worthy of this excellent first season. Apple TV+ just renewed Pachinko for a second season, so we’ll see what happens to these characters. But even if we didn’t, we’d have a very, very excellent saga to look back upon.
Apple TV+’s new surfing docuseries Make or Break charts the fortunes of nearly 50 competitors as they vie for the title at the World Championship of Surfing.
You get to know the underdogs and the favorites alike in this no-holds-barred look at the dangers and excitement of a sport that doesn’t always receive the prestige treatment. This snappily edited, seven-episode docuseries will show you the ins and outs of pro surfing as the competitors hunger for the title.
It’s hardly must-see TV, but it’s diverting enough.
Shining Girls, the new Apple TV+ thriller based on the 2013 novel by Lauren Beukes, brings Apple TV+ into competition with a number of other streamers’ giant successes.
Elisabeth Moss stars in this story of disintegrating realities and identities, which mixes a dash of The Handmaid’s Tale, a bit of True Detective, a hair of The Killing and just a little Sharp Objects.
Will this particular tale of depressive survivors catch on? It might be a touch too mysterious to sustain its hallucinatory story.
Apple TV+ spy series Slow Horses gets ready for the climactic showdown between MI5, Jackson Lamb’s misfit spies at Slough House and the kidnappers. Lamb hatches a plan to acquire some crucial evidence, but it involves subterfuge, bombs and the music of The Proclaimers.
Are these guys as clever as they pretend to be? The penultimate episode of season one delivers high highs and no lows — everything an hour of TV should be.
Pachinko, the stellar Apple TV+ series about the fortunes of a Korean family across decades and generations, takes time away from its main storyline to tell the story of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed tens of thousands of people in Japan.
The episode isn’t a full stylistic break, but it’s a very different animal from the rest of the season. It offers a harrowing look at one person’s struggle to survive before and after a disaster that forever changed the face of Japan and the Koreans who lived there.
Apple TV+’s WeCrashed is finally done, which means we can finally stop looking at the hollow eyes of Jared Leto as WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. The company can’t go public while Adam remains CEO. But Adam doesn’t ever want to not be CEO.
He left WeWork in terrible shape before the board kicked him to the curb, and the only solutions are expensive ones. If you’re still invested in this story, god bless. But the time for some of these people to face consequences was long, long ago.
Apple TV+’s latest documentary series is They Call Me Magic, a look at the life and legacy of one of the greatest and most flashy basketball players the game ever saw.
Director Rick Famuyiwa gives us a guided tour of Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr.’s game, the illness that took him out of professional sports, and the family members — both professional and blood — who made his life hard but worth living. The documentary’s form is digestible and the story is a necessary window into living memory, to see at once how far we’ve come and how little we’ve changed.
This week, Pachinko rewinds to Solomon’s upbringing, the birth of a false hope, and the dying days of a wayward daughter. The Apple TV+ series brings out some big guns to connect the trauma of the past and present. And as usual, the cast, crew and writers are up to the task.
The developments this week are soapy and tug on your heartstrings as everyone does their best to make this material stick in your mind week to week. When you’re building a story out of little moments of heartache, it’s tough to keep them all equal. But this crew has done an amazing job with this material.
Slough House’s Slow Horses are on the run in this week’s installment of the Apple TV+ dark comedy about rogue failed spies working at the bottom of the British intelligence circus.
Slough House chief Jackson Lamb makes a Faustian bargain with Standish. River can’t help but check on Sid. Min’s crush on Louisa deepens. Struan gets picked up. Ho is in the wind. And everyone’s afraid of Taverner.
It’s another cracking potboiler of an episode this week as the noose tightens around everyone.
WeWork is finally going public in this week’s installment of Apple TV+ series WeCrashed. But is it too late for the company? Is it too late to save Adam and Rebekah’s marriage? And are any of these truly pertinent questions in a show about the waste of millions of dollars, aired during an economic crisis?
The show goes long on the emotional connection and dreams of these characters at a time when interest in them — after six episodes of watching them behave like spoiled children — is at an all-time low.
Apple TV+’s newest series is Roar, an anthology series based on the short story collection by Cecelia Ahern. Shepherded by Glow showrunners and playwrights Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, the show is a collection of vignettes shot and presented in roughly the same style.
Each takes on a different facet of womanhood. And each contains some element of magical realism. The first season, which debuts Friday, seems like a mixed bag, to put it delicately. But the high points of these “feminist fables” prove high indeed.
Slow Horses enters the thick of its spy games this week in an excellent third episode. Jackson Lamb is in Dutch with M15 chief Diana Taverner just as she screws up an important operation — and implicates him and his whole team at Slough House, the reject pile of the British intelligence service.
As a result, they enter into a sleazy bargain to clean up the mess together. Of course, nothing’s ever as easy as it seems when your business is underhanded espionage. The pace and the tension ratchet up for a marvelous little installment of this new spy show on Apple TV+.
Pachinko, the new Apple TV+ series based on the book by Min Jin Lee, arrives in Japan and returns to Korea in this week’s episode.
Solomon and Sunja become amateur detectives in search of a lost woman and a missing grave site. Houses become homes, and countries swallow each other up in the search for identity. No one’s exactly happy, but the characters muddle their way toward something like peace with the worlds they’ve left behind.
All along the way, this epic show continues to impress.
WeCrashed, the Apple TV+ show about overhyped co-working startup WeWork, starts to bring the walls down around founder Adam Neumann this week. As his wife, Rebekah, demands more and more of the pie for herself, Adam keeps screwing up important meetings and losing his standing among his investors and cheerleaders.
The wheels are about to come off — and the only one who can’t see it is Adam. Now, if only any of this were remotely as compelling as the directors and writers deemed it, it would be a lot more exciting to tune into the fifth episode of a show about how supposedly terrible investment banking is that nevertheless revels in all the resulting excess.
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, the Apple TV+ series based on the book by Walter Mosley, winds down with a somber closing chapter. Ptolemy has one last score to settle before his memory leaves him for good and Robyn is once more on her own.
The only thing left for him to do in this breathtaking finale is leave the world a better place than he found it.
Ptolemy Grey has been an odd six hours of TV: part science fiction parable, part brutal historical memoir, part comment on race relations and changing mores, and part beautiful family/relationship drama. It perhaps had a little trouble keeping every single element in even proportions. But for every little misstep or fumble, there are dramatic beats, performance notes, shots, cuts and scenes that are worth twice a regular TV show’s whole season.