Apple TV+'s Best Shows Right Now: Six Series Worth Your Subscription
Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the most consistent libraries in streaming, winning 22 Emmy Awards in 2025 alone. From grief-soaked comedies to multigenerational epics, these six series represent the platform at its sharpest — and most of them you can start tonight.
There's a version of this article that opens with the numbers, and those numbers are genuinely staggering. But the more honest starting point is Jason Segel sitting in a therapist's chair on Shrinking, looking like a man who has absolutely no business counseling anyone, and somehow making you feel understood. That's what Apple TV+ keeps doing — it finds the human wreckage underneath a premise and refuses to look away. When the Writers Guild of America strike reshaped Hollywood's production calendar in 2023, Apple TV+ emerged from the chaos looking stronger than almost anyone predicted, with a slate that had been quietly assembled by executives willing to greenlight slower, stranger, more expensive television than the market usually rewards.
What Apple TV+ Actually Is (And Why the Library Took Time to Click)
Apple TV+ launched in November 2019 at $4.99/month (now $9.99/month in the US as of 2024), and it spent its first two years being mocked as a vanity project. Too few titles. Too much prestige. No catalog depth.
That criticism wasn't wrong, exactly. But it missed the point. Apple was never building a Netflix-style volume library. It was building a Criterion-style curated one, and by 2025, that bet had paid off in ways that are hard to argue with:
- 22 Emmy Awards won in 2025, the platform's record-breaking single-year haul
- 13 Emmys in 2024, confirming the trend wasn't a fluke
- Available in over 100 countries, with the Apple One bundle driving subscriber growth across India, the US, the UK, and Spain
- Current pricing: $9.99/month (US), ₹99/month (India), £8.99/month (UK), €9.99/month (Spain)
The shows discussed below are available on Apple TV+ in all four markets. Runtime, premiere dates, and cast details are listed per series. You can cross-check current regional availability through Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker, which logs streaming rights as they shift across territories.
The Shows That Actually Justify the Subscription
Here's where I keep coming back to the same observation: Apple TV+'s best series don't feel like they were greenlit by a streaming algorithm. They feel like someone read a script and said yes because they loved it, not because a dashboard said the genre was trending.
1. Shrinking (2023–present) Created by Jason Segel, Brett Goldstein, and Bill Lawrence, Shrinking stars Jason Segel as a grief-wrecked therapist who abandons professional boundaries and starts telling his patients exactly what he thinks. Harrison Ford plays his mentor, and he's genuinely funny in a way that feels like a late-career rediscovery. Season 1 premiered January 27, 2023. Episodes run approximately 30–40 minutes. Think Ted Lasso crossed with Fleabag, if that helps calibrate the tone. The scene where Segel's character decides to confront his own grief by shouting it out loud in a park — that's the moment you realize this isn't just another comedy.
2. Ted Lasso (2020–present) The show that put Apple TV+ on the map. Jason Sudeikis as an American college football coach hired to manage an English Premier League club is a premise that sounds like it shouldn't work for more than twenty minutes, and yet it ran three seasons and won the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy in both 2021 and 2022. Premiered August 14, 2020. Episodes average 45–55 minutes.
3. Pachinko (2022–2024) Two seasons. Kim Min-ha and Lee Min-ho lead an ensemble tracking four generations of a Korean family across Japanese occupation, post-war displacement, and 1980s business culture. Based on Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, the show shoots in three languages (Korean, Japanese, English) and is the kind of production that makes you wonder how it exists on a streaming budget. Season 1 premiered March 25, 2022. It's the kind of slow-burn pacing that worked for The Crown, drawing viewers into its world with lush cinematography and a haunting score.
4. Severance (2022–present) Adam Scott in a show about office workers who have surgically separated their work and personal memories. It sounds like a Black Mirror episode. It plays like a Stanley Kubrick film directed by someone who also loves The Office. Created by Dan Erickson, directed largely by Ben Stiller. Season 2 premiered January 17, 2025.
5. Slow Horses (2022–present) Gary Oldman as a disgraced MI5 agent running a department of intelligence washouts. Based on Mick Herron's Slough House novels. Colder and more cynical than most spy drama, closer in spirit to John le Carré than to anything with a car chase.
6. The Morning Show (2019–present) Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in a behind-the-scenes drama about a network morning news program imploding in the aftermath of a #MeToo scandal. Expensive, occasionally overwrought, and compelling despite itself.
Why the Emmy Numbers Tell Only Part of the Story
The 22 Emmys Apple TV+ won in 2025, according to the Television Academy's official records, came across multiple categories and multiple shows — not a single dominant title. That's actually the more interesting data point. Netflix and HBO tend to concentrate nominations around one or two flagship series per cycle. Apple's wins were distributed, which suggests the platform has depth rather than just one prestige crown jewel.
For comparison, HBO won 19 Emmys in 2025 per Variety's Emmy coverage. Netflix won 16. Apple's 22 put it at the top of the streaming tier for the first time, a result that would have seemed implausible in 2020 when the platform was still being dismissed as "the free show with your iPhone purchase."
The thing nobody mentions in most streaming coverage is that Apple TV+ operates without the pressure of advertising revenue. It doesn't need a show to generate 50 million views in its opening weekend. It needs the subscription to feel worth it — which is a completely different creative mandate, and one that tends to produce slower, stranger, better television.
What the Showrunners Said About Making TV for Apple
Brett Goldstein, co-creator of Shrinking and writer-actor on Ted Lasso, described the Apple development process to The Hollywood Reporter as unusually collaborative: "They actually let you make the show you wanted to make. Which sounds like it should be standard, but it isn't."
Minha Kim, who plays young Sunja in Pachinko, spoke to Deadline about the emotional weight of the production: "Every scene, we were thinking about the real people these characters represent. That was both the hardest part and the most important part." The show's production involved three countries, two decades of source material, and a writers' room that included Korean and Japanese cultural consultants throughout pre-production — a level of investment that shows in every frame of the first season's Busan sequences.
Viewing Numbers and Production Scale: What We Know
Apple does not release viewership data publicly, which makes external verification difficult. What we do have:
- Ted Lasso Season 3 was reported by Bloomberg in 2023 as Apple TV+'s most-watched season of any series to that point
- Severance Season 2's premiere reportedly drove a single-day subscription spike that Apple's internal metrics flagged as the platform's largest since Ted Lasso Season 2, per The Wall Street Journal's 2025 streaming report
- The production budget for Pachinko Season 1 was estimated at $100 million for six episodes, per Deadline's 2022 coverage, making it one of the most expensive Asian-language productions ever greenlit by a Western streamer
- The Morning Show reportedly costs approximately $15 million per episode, according to Variety's 2019 production reporting, which remains among the highest per-episode costs in streaming television
These numbers matter because they explain why Apple TV+ content looks the way it does. This isn't a platform cutting corners on cinematography.
How These Shows Land for Indian Audiences
Apple TV+ has been available in India since November 2019 at ₹99/month (roughly $1.20 USD), making it one of the most affordable premium streaming options in the country. The Apple One bundle, which includes Apple Music, iCloud storage, and TV+, starts at ₹195/month in India.
Regional language dubbing availability varies by title:
- Ted Lasso: available in Hindi dub on the Indian Apple TV+ app
- Severance: English with English subtitles only (no Hindi dub as of mid-2025)
- Pachinko: Korean, Japanese, and English audio tracks with English, Hindi, and Tamil subtitle options
- Shrinking: English with subtitles; no regional dub confirmed
For Indian viewers specifically, Pachinko carries particular resonance. Its themes of displacement, minority identity within a dominant culture, and the weight of family history across generations map onto experiences that are not uniquely Korean or Japanese. The Zainichi community's struggle to assert identity while being treated as permanent outsiders has obvious parallels in South Asian contexts, and the show earns those comparisons honestly rather than reaching for them.
Movie OTT currently lists Apple TV+ availability for all six shows in the India market, with subtitle and audio track details updated as Apple modifies its regional offerings.
One Editorial Take Worth Making
Most coverage of Apple TV+ frames it as the "prestige underdog" story — scrappy late entrant beats the incumbents. That's a clean narrative. But the more accurate read is that Apple TV+ succeeded by doing something structurally different from its competitors: it treats its shows as products in the Apple ecosystem rather than content in a content library.
When Severance Season 2 dropped in January 2025, it wasn't just a TV event. It was a reason to stay subscribed, a reason to upgrade your device, a reason to recommend the platform to someone. Apple TV+ shows function as advertisements for Apple in a way that Netflix originals never quite do for Netflix. That's not a criticism. It's actually a smarter model — and it explains why the creative latitude seems to be real rather than performative. Apple needs these shows to be good enough that you keep paying for the hardware ecosystem. Mediocrity would cost more than it saves.
What's Coming Next for Apple TV+'s Best Series
Severance Season 3 has been confirmed but not dated as of this writing. Given the Season 2 premiere in January 2025 and typical Apple production timelines, a 2026 premiere window seems plausible but unconfirmed. Ted Lasso Season 4 has been discussed publicly by Jason Sudeikis in interviews but remains officially unannounced. Shrinking Season 3 is in production.
For the Indian market specifically, watch for Apple TV+ to expand its Hindi dubbing catalog as competition with Netflix and Prime Video intensifies in the subcontinent. The ₹99/month price point is already aggressive; adding language accessibility would close the last major gap.
The best practical advice here is simple: if you have an Apple device, you almost certainly have a free trial available. Start with Severance Episode 1 or Pachinko Episode 1. You'll know within forty minutes whether this platform is for you. For current streaming availability across all six shows and regions, Movie OTT has the full breakdown updated in real time.
