Our pick of 7 of the best original Apple TV+ shows, from Slow Horses to Severance

It’s sometimes tricky, given just how much good TV there is out there, to know what to watch. Which is why we’ve done some of the hard work for you.

From pacey thrillers to nail-biting dramas, to psychological thrillers to period drama mysteries, Apple TV+ has made some truly excellent original series since launching in 2019.

The streaming service has spent the last four years building a reputation for making high quality shows that will keep you guessing until the end. Here are seven of our favourites, listed in no particular order.

This glorious thriller is the stuff of any wine fan’s dreams. Fleur Geffrier is Camille, a woman who is left the world’s largest wine collection, worth a whopping $148 million, by her estranged father. There is one small hurdle. In order to inherit the collection, she must go head to head in an extensive sommelier challenge against her dad’s own exceptional student, Issei (Tomohisa Yamashita). The stakes are, obviously, impossibly high: if she loses, Issei gets the cellar. Glossy, eerie, featuring vineyards, stunning design homes in glass and wood, and played out in French, Japanese and English, this ice-cold drama, based on the manga series, is a Grand Cru.

I’ve said it myself more than once. Wouldn’t it be nice if work-related thoughts could truly be left at work, and not brought home, sullying your precious down time? That is the premise of Severance, from writer Dan Erickson and co-directors Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle. Starring Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Patricia Arquette, it explores what might happen if your personal memories could only be accessed outside of the office, and your work memories only during office hours. Not good things, says the thriller: parking parts of yourself for hours at a time leaves you wide open for nefarious actors to wreak havoc upon your life.

Jennifer Anniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell going head to head as old and new anchors of one of America’s notoriously highly competitive news shows? Sign us up. As might be expected, the characters are monstrous and deeply ruthless, fighting for power and attention. There’s fresh talent, the older female anchor worrying about her deepening facial lines, allegations of sexual misconduct, political fights, a looming tech titan takeover and a global pandemic. A real doozy for news-lovers, which has been renewed for a fourth and fifth season.

This joyful football series, which concluded in June last year, became a crutch for millions around the world during the pandemic. The story follows Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) an American football coach, who comes to the UK to coach soccer club AFC Richmond. He’s all soppy and hopeful and open with his emotions; the Brits don’t know what to do with him but are lowkey touched. Audiences fell in love with both the premise and Ted: “It is one of the best performing shows in AppleTV+’s stable and has more than 20 Emmy nominations under its belt – and it’s not hard to see why,” said the Standard about the show’s third and final season. Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple and Brett Goldstein also star.

We love a good British spy thriller, and this one has a particularly fun twist. Rather than imagining the goings-on of Britain's brightest in London’s glossy MI5 headquarters, Slow Horses, a black-comedy written by co-written by not-the-American-actor Will Smith (who co-wrote HBO’s Veep) tells the story of a bunch of spies who made terrible gaffs in their careers, so got shunted over to a kind of outhouse, Slough House. Starring Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Olivia Cooke, Jonathan Pryce and Freddie Fox, it’s huge fun with a taut thriller running through its centre.

It’s many people’s worse nightmare realised: Idris Elba is business negotiator Sam Nelson whose flight from Dubai to Heathrow gets hijacked. In this edge-of-the-seat series you are invited to watch the seven-hour flight in real-time as Sam tries to overthrow the British criminals and safely land the plane. “This new TV thriller is a bingeable treat – though it does verge on the ridiculous,” said the Standard.

More than two decades after the release of Band of Brothers, the stellar World War Two drama, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman reunited to make Masters of the Air. Based on the 2007 fictional book by historian Donald L Miller, which itself draws on real-life events, the story follows the 8th Air Force, an American bomber group whose efforts were integral to the allies domination of European skies in the Second World War. It features an all-star cast including Oscar-nominees Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan, Callum Turner (Emma) and Ncuti Gatwa and picked up some stellar reviews.