★★★★☆
New Apple TV+ dark comedy Bad Sisters follows a family of Irish women who vow to help each other through thick and thin. Thick comes in the form of a miserable brother-in-law, who’s lying in a coffin and represents loose ends for all of them.
Can they outmaneuver a desperate insurance investigator and keep from turning on each other? This is good TV. Let’s just watch it cook.
Apple TV+ offered a first look at upcoming drama series Shantaram this week in the form of a photo of star Charlie Hunnam (Son of Anarchy) in character, plus a rundown of the cast and plot of the adventure-romance, set to premiere October 14.
And speaking of drama and adventure, the production ran into big trouble on the way to becoming a reality.
The Garvey sisters vowed to always take care of each other, which leads them toward murdering their abusive brother-in-law. Their scheme plays out in Bad Sisters, a creation of Irish actress, writer and producer Sharon Horgan, who is known for her darkly funny shows.
The comedy/thriller series debuts on Apple TV+ in August, and a trailer debuted Wednesday.
The first trailer for the psychological thriller Surface lets viewers dip their toes into the central mystery of the upcoming series: What if you woke up one day and didn’t know your own secrets?
The show premiers on Apple TV+ in late July, and stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw, best known for appearing in Apple’s critically acclaimed The Morning Show.
Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo will take the leads as police detectives in Criminal Record, a thriller series coming to Apple TV+.
It will be set in racially charged and politically polarized modern London.
★★☆☆☆
In the season finale of Apple TV+ spy drama Tehran, Peyman is dead — and everyone is guilty.
Milad and Tamar need to patch up their frayed relationship if they have any hope of escaping the country and certain death. Marjan and Faraz must make sure they don’t look guilty as the investigation into the “accidental” death of the son of the head of the Revolutionary Guard commences.
And there’s still the matter of Peyman’s father, Qassem, whom Tamar swore to kill. Now, she has next to no shot at getting near him. It’s a lot of ground to cover in 43 minutes. And there’s still the more difficult task of making any of these people compelling enough to want to see them in a third season.
Apple TV+ today revealed the premiere date for Five Days at Memorial, a harrowing medical drama set amidst the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Its global launch is August 12
And the dark comedy/murder mystery Bad Sisters will hit Apple’s streaming service a week later.
★★☆☆☆
This week on Tehran, the Apple TV+ spy thriller narrows its options until there’s only one thing remaining: Mossad agent Tamar and Revolutionary Guard leader Faraz, face to face, heading to a party to carry out an assassination.
If she fails, dozens of people will die. If she succeeds, her target will be dead — but so will Faraz (and probably his wife).
The season’s penultimate episode rests on a climactic car race, with Tamar’s boyfriend Milad making life-or-death decisions and her hands tied. This slightly dodgy second season still time to straighten itself out.
★★★☆☆
Iranian spy chief Faraz loses everything as Mossad agent Tamar plans to do just the same thing in this week’s high-strung episode of Tehran. Having had two attempts to kill Mohammadi thwarted by circumstance, Tamar is ready to risk everything to kill him if she must.
Meanwhile, Milad finds himself at the end of his tether, Marjan must flee the country, and absolutely nobody’s cover is safe.
As the second season of the Apple TV+ spy thriller winds down, the show sticks to its best tricks: simply showing the nuts and bolts of spycraft and broken allegiances.
★★★☆☆
Apple TV+ thriller Shining Girls draws to a shocking close Friday as time is pulled out from under Jin-Sook and Kirby like a rug. Time-bending serial killer Harper’s on a mission to change history, and Kirby realizes she has only hours to stop him, no matter how.
The show, which spends too little time on the consequences of having your world changed from a humanist point of view, nevertheless gets credit for doing such a great job handling the plot points.
Apple TV+ revealed that the psychological thriller Surface from Veronica West will premiere on July 29. It stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw, best known for appearing in Apple’s critically acclaimed The Morning Show.
The upcoming series asks, what if you woke up one day and didn’t know your own secrets?
★★☆☆☆
Apple TV+’s Tehran goes to jail this week as everybody’s best-laid plans come crashing down. As the tension on the show ratchets up approaching the season finale, the obvious imbalance in the two groups of opposing Mossad and Iranian agents shrinks.
That makes watching the show for fun a little easier, but always there’s a lingering uneasiness about who Tehran’s heroes and villains really are.
★★★☆☆
Shining Girls enters its endgame this week in a thrilling episode that’s heavy on plot and light on psychological depth. Just as Kirby (played by Elisabeth Moss) thinks she finally understands the next step in serial killer Harper’s game plan, reporter Dan runs off to chase leads. And her bewildered husband Marcus betrays them both without meaning to.
Can anyone hold onto their reality long enough to come out on top? This terrifically directed episode has the answers.
★★★★☆
Apple TV+’s Now and Then, a Miami-based murder mystery, starts to play dirty this week.
New roommates Marcos, Isabel and Sofia are primed to turn on each other. Political couple Ana and Pedro have a huge, expensive mess on their hands. Mother and son Daniela and Hugo might have more secrets than anyone. And Detective Neruda finally opens up about the reasons she’s so committed to catching and convicting all of them.
This sleek little show has as much confidence as it does wonderfully seedy plot threads. The excellent first season continues apace.
★★☆☆☆
Apple TV+ spy thriller Tehran throws a sexy and tense pool party so Mossad agent Tamar can get one over on her targets: the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and his tech bro son. She has to play a game of cat and mouse with a couple of rich, violent people to get close enough to deploy a decoy that will give her the upper hand — and maybe kill the man responsible for the deaths of her family.
Of course, she put them in danger in the first place, something the show isn’t interested in exploring anymore now that there’s a new spy game afoot. But no matter. Once more unto the breach.
★★★☆☆
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.
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.
The metaphysical-horror-thriller Shining Girls only premiered on Apple TV+ a few days ago, but the Elisabeth Moss series is already in the top 10 most streamed shows. And it’s drawing positive reviews, too.
Plus, the Apple TV+ hit Severance remains on the weekly list of popular shows, despite wrapping up its first season more than three weeks ago.
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.