Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the more interesting libraries among popular streaming platforms. Somewhere between the breakout dramas and the shows that everyone seems to be talking about, there are a handful of truly great shows that just sit there, unseen.
So let’s fix that this weekend. Whether you’re in the mood for a thriller that messes with your grip on reality or something that just haunts you with sound, there’s something here for you. Here are three underrated Apple TV+ shows that are worth your time.
We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.
Counterpart (2017)
Howard Silk has worked a quiet, low-profile job at a Berlin-based UN agency for 30 years, shuffling papers and exchanging coded messages he doesn’t understand. One day he is told the truth: under the building there is a transition to a parallel earth that split off from ours in 1987 and has since taken a completely different direction. To make matters worse, his counterpart from this other world, also called Howard Silk, has nothing to do with him at all. Same face, same story, but a completely different man.
JK Simmons plays both versions with such complete differentiation that you never lose track of which Howard you’re watching. It’s one of the best double acts I’ve seen in recent television shows. The series wraps its parallel world concept in the dense atmosphere of Cold War espionage: Berlin backyards, dead mailboxes, sleeping agents and the paranoia of never knowing whose side someone is really on.
You can watch Counterpart on Apple TV.
Calls (2021)
There are no pictures here in this underrated Apple TV show. What you get instead is a series of phone conversations between strangers, overlaid with abstract, shifting patterns of light and sound as something catastrophic and inexplicable begins to unravel the world around them. Each of the nine short episodes takes you into a different conversation, most of which are frightening in the faintest of ways.
The cast is stacked: Pedro Pascal, Aubrey Plaza, Lily Collins, Rosario Dawson and others, none of whom you ever see. You just hear them, and that’s what it’s all about. Directed by Fede Álvarez, the filmmaker behind Don’t Breathe, the series understands that what fills your imagination is always scarier than what any screen can show you.
You can watch Calls on Apple TV.
Radiant Girls (2022)
Kirby Mazrachi is a newspaper archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times trying to keep her life together after surviving a brutal attack. The problem is that their reality is constantly changing around them. She comes home and suddenly has a dog instead of a cat. She discovers that she is married to a man she only remembers as a colleague. Your desk at work is constantly moving. Nobody notices except Kirby.
Elisabeth Moss carries the whole thing on her back, and she is exceptional as she channels Kirby’s confidence and fears differently in each shifting version of reality. Jamie Bell is quite frightening in his role as the villain. The series uses time travel not as a gimmick, but to show how one person’s violence can cause ripples and trap their victims in a reality they cannot fully trust. It starts off slow and is intentionally disorienting, which is exactly the point.
You can watch Shining Girls on Apple TV.
