Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the more interesting libraries among the popular streaming platforms. Somewhere between the buzzy dramas and the shows that everyone seems to be talking about, there are a handful of genuinely great series just sitting there, unwatched.
So let’s fix that this weekend. Whether you are in the mood for a thriller that messes with your grip on reality or something that will haunt you using nothing but sound, there is something here for you. Here are three underrated 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.
Counterpart (2017)
Howard Silk has spent 30 years doing a quiet, unremarkable job at a Berlin-based UN agency, shuffling papers and exchanging coded messages he does not understand. One day, he is told the truth: there is a crossing beneath the building to a parallel Earth, one that split from ours in 1987 and has since gone in a very different direction. To make things worse, his counterpart from that other world, also called Howard Silk, is nothing like him. Same face, same history, but entirely different man.
J.K. Simmons plays both versions with such complete distinction that you never lose track of which Howard you are watching. It is one of the best dual performances I have seen in recent TV shows. The show wraps its parallel world concept in the thick atmosphere of Cold War espionage: Berlin backstreets, dead drops, sleeper agents, and the paranoia of never knowing whose side anyone is really on.
You can watch Counterpart on Apple TV.
Calls (2021)
There are no visuals here in this underrated Apple TV show. What you get instead is a series of phone calls between strangers, laid over 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 drops you into a different conversation, most of them terrifying in the quietest possible way.
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 turns out to be the point. Directed by Fede Álvarez, the filmmaker behind Don’t Breathe, the show understands that what your imagination fills in is always scarier than what any screen can show you.
You can watch Calls on Apple TV.
Shining Girls (2022)
Kirby Mazrachi is a newspaper archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times trying to hold her life together after surviving a brutal assault. The problem is that her reality keeps changing around her. She comes home and suddenly owns a dog instead of a cat. She discovers she is married to a man she only remembers as a colleague. Her desk at work keeps moving. No one else notices except for Kirby.
Elisabeth Moss carries the whole thing on her back, and she is extraordinary, calibrating Kirby’s confidence and anxiety differently across each shifting version of reality. Jamie Bell is quietly terrifying as the villain. The show uses time travel not as a gimmick but as a way of showing how one person’s violence can create ripples, trapping its victims in a reality they cannot fully trust. It is slow to start and deliberately disorienting, which is entirely the point.
You can watch Shining Girls on Apple TV.
