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.

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.

No stranger to racking up awards, Apple TV+ has now won its first for the unsettling hit drama Severance. Adam Scott, who plays Lumon Industries employee Mark S. on the show, will get The Webby Awards nod for best actor at a ceremony in New York City on May 16.

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.

Apple TV+ landed Hijack, a thriller starring Idris Elba set on a plane that’s been hijacked. It will be a seven-episode series covering seven hours of action, so it’ll be told in real time — a technique that should be familiar to fans of 24.

Apple’s streaming service loves thrillers, and already has quite a few of them, with more on the way.

There are youthful indiscretions, and then there are youthful indiscretions. When a celebration among college besties ends up with someone dead, and everyone figures they can escape blame, well, that’s something that might come back 20 years later to haunt … everyone.

Along those lines, Apple TV+ shared a roughly 2-minute peek Tuesday at its new bilingual thriller Now & Then. The eight-episode series is scheduled to debut on the streaming service May 20.

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.

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+.

Severance draws its excellent first season to a close this week with an episode that makes excellent use of every second of its pulse-pounding airtime.

The perfectly curated frames give way to woozy chaos as Lumon Industries workers Irving, Mark and Helly experience the outside world for the “first” time.

Revelations await them. And they’re going to have be savvy if they want to get away with this illegal operation to bring down Lumon. Everyone’s in fine form as usual, and the show makes a great case for a second season. (Which Apple just made official, BTW.)

Apple TV+ today committed to a second season of Severance, a series popular with viewers and critics alike. That’s good news for fans, as they’ll be able to keep unraveling the mysteries of Lumon Industries.

Season one wraps up April 7, so those who’ve held off watching until they could binge the show can soon dive in.