What To Watch on AppleTV+ Freebie Weekend
Dame Sophie has -- wait for it -- enthusiastic and opinionated suggestions!
Happy New Year! I hope!! One genuinely nice thing that’s about to happen is that AppleTV+ is going to be available for free this weekend, from Friday to Sunday. Anyone with an AppleID (which you can set up for free if you don’t already have one) can watch anything in their library. There are so many excellent, engrossing, fun, beautiful, thought-provoking series available that I thought I’d write up a little What To Watch guide for anyone who wants to give it a whirl, and for those of you who already subscribe to this streamer and are looking for your next favorite show. All of the links are to YouTube videos, with a few exceptions I’ve called out so you can save your clicks on sites that paywall their content. Let’s go!
Pachinko is an adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same title, and for me, is the best show on the entire platform. It’s a family saga set against Korean and Japanese history from the early 1900s to the late 1980s (so far), features performances of devastating humane-ness and delicacy, and has the best credit sequences I’ve ever seen (each season has its own version, and both are fantastic).
For the scifi lovers, the obvious (and correct) recommendation is for Severance, which is coming back with its second season on the 17th, and which I suspect is the primary driver of this freebie weekend. If you’ve already seen it, or just don’t fancy a show about the ultimate potential iteration of work-life balance that is also a meditation on how susceptible we are, as a species, to cults and false promises of shortcuts through unpleasant experiences like grief, may I interest you in the space opera of Foundation? Its two seasons are sumptuous, swoony, and pretty merciless; it’s got very high-end cloning, time jumps, rebellions fomenting at a variety of paces, and speaking of paces, LEE PACE is here as one of three clones of a specific emperor always on hand to step in should he or one of his fellow clones meet an untimely end. I’m not doing it justice, but it’s a loopy, compelling, unjustly hidden gem.
If that doesn’t float your boat, don’t sleep on For All Mankind, a workplace-and-family drama that also speculates about what might have happened if the Soviets had gotten to the moon first. So many changes to world-and-individual person history cascade from that difference! Women join the space program way earlier and in higher numbers than they did in our timeline! Sincere, good-faith US-USSR cooperation in space is a thing! Calamities occur and people rise to the heroic occasion, only for the very notion of heroism come in for gimlet-eyed critique in the following season! I’ve been recapping For All Mankind for Vulture since its second season, and for all that the fourth season drove me around the bend a little bit, I also can’t wait for the fifth to arrive.
Even if I hadn’t written a lot about Manhunt this year, I’d still recommend it as one of my Top 10 Shows Overall and Top 5 Quality Dad Shows of 2024. How did the Union capture Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth? Who was involved? Why did it take over two weeks to get this guy? It’s plenty compelling on its face, and is even better than it needed to be thanks to how much care and skill went into every aspect of its production. A stacked cast (Tobias Menzies, Anthony Boyle, Lili Taylor)? You got it! Sumptuous costumes by Katie Irish (probably most well-known for her work on The Americans)? Don’t mind if I do! Scripts that remind viewers that history happens because people make decisions? Monica Beletsky, Mat Johnson, and talented colleagues, thank you and let’s gooooooo! Oh, and is standard practice for AppleTV+ series, it’s got a riveting credit sequence, this one anchored by “Egún”, the theme song Danielle Ponder wrote specifically for the series. The conversation I had with Danielle about the song and about having quit being a public defender to be a full-time musician is one of my favorite pieces of the year and is unpaywalled. (Also unpaywalled: for Primetimer, of most blessed memory, I also reviewed it and interviewed Anthony Boyle, who’s had quite a year bringing men of history to the screen, about playing Booth.)
Slow Horses is the Old Reliable of AppleTV+’s lineup, giving us 6 episodes every year that showcase bang-up writing, first-rate acting, and fun-to-devastating twists and turns. The only problem with Slow Horses is that we’re going to have to wait for Season 5 to debut next fall. I’m not into time travel for myself as a general rule (you know what the past lacks? Antibiotics, laws supporting the notion that women are actually people, adequate indoor plumbing. No thank you!) but I would make an exception if it meant I could travel forward in time just enough to have access to Season 5 right now. In the absence of a personal TARDIS, choosing to watch all four available seasons this weekend would be a very good decision for kicking off your tv viewing year.
ATV+ has been an incredible incubator for Bill Lawrence – since 2016, it’s given us Ted Lasso, Shrinking, and Bad Monkey, which was one of my favorite series of the year. It’s an adaptation of the great Carl Hiaasen’s sunshine noir (also titled Bad Monkey), it stars Vince Vaughn at peak Vince Vaughn-iness, clearly relishing a pep in his step that I didn’t know he could still summon, making it the dictionary definition of a romp. It’s a treat, it’s a dose of Vitamin C you didn’t know you needed, it takes a couple of dark turns (as it should; it is a murder-and-corruption show, after all), and it’s got a soundtrack of wall-to-wall Tom Petty covers. A second season adapting the book’s sequel, Razor Girl, has been greenlit, so I’m hoping we’ll get to enjoy that in earlyish 2026. I had a really fun conversation with Lawrence about the making of Bad Monkey for The Daily Beast’s Obsessed earlier this summer, too!
Okay, that’s what I’ve got — go forth & view, and let me know what new favorite(s) you found!