Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the most interesting libraries among popular streaming platforms. Somewhere between the hit dramas and the shows everyone seems to be talking about, there are a handful of great reality series that just sit, unwatched.
So let’s fix that this weekend. Whether you’re in the mood for a sensation that confuses your grasp on reality or something that will haunt you using nothing but noise, there’s something here for you. Here are three Apple TV+ shows 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.
Spouse (2017)
Howard Silk has spent 30 years doing a quiet, uncomplicated job at the Berlin-based UN agency, shuffling papers and sending coded messages he doesn’t understand. One day, you are told the truth: there is a path that goes under the building to the same Earth, which separated from ours in 1987 and since then has traveled a very different path. To make matters worse, his fellow countryman, also named Howard Silk, is nothing like him. Same face, same history, but a completely different person.
JK Simmons plays both versions with such complete contrast that you never lose track of which Howard you’re watching. It’s one of the best double plays I’ve seen on recent TV shows. The show wraps its parallel world concept in the dense atmosphere of Cold War espionage: Berlin streets, dead drops, sleeper agents, and the confusion of not knowing who’s really on whose side.
You can watch Companion to Apple TV.
Calls (2021)
There is nothing to see here in this unrented Apple TV game. What you get instead is a series of calls between strangers, layered over invisible, shifting patterns of light and sound, as something catastrophic and mysterious begins to unravel the world around them. Each of the nine short episodes puts you in a different conversation, most of which is very quietly terrifying.
The actors are stacked: Pedro Pascal, Aubrey Plaza, Lily Collins, Rosario Dawson, and others, whom you have never seen before. You just hear them, it just becomes the point. Directed by Fede Álvarez, the filmmaker behind Don’t Breathe, the program understands that what fills your imagination is always more terrifying than any screen can show.
You can watch Calls to Apple TV.
Shining Girls (2022)
Kirby Mazrachi is a newspaper archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times trying to hold his life together after surviving a brutal attack. The problem is that his reality keeps changing around him. You suddenly come home with a dog instead of a cat. She finds out that she is married to a man she only remembers as her colleague. His desk at work keeps moving. No one else notices except Kirby.
Elisabeth Moss carries everything on her back, and she’s amazing, balancing Kirby’s confidence and anxiety differently in each changing version of reality. Jamie Bell is quietly terrifying as the villain. The show uses the passage of time not as a trick but as a way to show that one person’s violence can create ripples, trapping its victims in a reality they cannot fully trust. It’s slow to start and deliberately distracting, which is entirely the point.
You can watch Shining Girls on Apple TV.
