The Drop

Think of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed as the Swiss Army knife of the Apple TV+ lineup — it works for a number of occasions. Looking to check out and decompress after work? Check. Need something twisty enough to get your blood pumping? Check. Sugarfish and a show with your guy or gal? Check again. Paula (Tatiana Maslany), a divorced mom and fact-checker barely keeping her life together, spends her evenings on video calls with a cam boy — until one of those calls is interrupted by what looks like a kidnapping. The police call it a scam. Paula calls bullshit. It's a hell of a hook. It's also refreshing to see a show where the person hooked on porn and making terrible decisions isn't a middle-aged man for once. One minute Paula's sneaking into the office bathroom for a quick fix with her cam boy. The next she's showing up at a blackmailer's apartment armed with a hockey stick. The show bounces between sex, blackmail, violence, dark comedy, and mystery with surprising ease — and just enough intrigue to keep you smashing the "next episode" button. Maslany's excellent — we'd watch her read a phone book at this point. Her co-workers end up being one of the better surprises of the season. Their jokes land. The violence lands harder. One minute you're laughing at a pair of overeducated amateur detectives. The next somebody's having a very bad day involving a nail gun and expanding foam. Does it live up to the promise of "maximum" in the title, the heart-pounding trailer, or that bass-thumping theme song? Not quite. But there aren't many shows built around a horny divorced mom accidentally stumbling into a criminal conspiracy. If you like Tatiana Maslany, blackmail, and the occasional burst of violence, you'll have a very good time with Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.

With Widow's Bay, a horror-comedy hybrid on Apple TV+, every episode feels like somebody found an unpublished Stephen King novella and handed it to the people behind Parks & Recreation. To be fair, creator Katie Dippold wrote for Parks and Rec, so we guess that tracks. And with Hiro Murai helping steer the ship, they've pulled off one of television's trickiest balancing acts. The series follows the mayor of a tiny New England island trying to turn a cursed fishing town into a tourist destination. The locals insist the island is cursed. He insists it needs better marketing. Then summer arrives, the ferries fill up, and the island's ghost stories stop feeling like small-town superstition. Watching Widow's Bay feels like a parade of small-town folklore coming to life: a supernatural fog tied to disappearances and deaths, the Haunted Inn — which is exactly what you think it is — and monsters around every corner. There's a killer clown, a town witch, a murderous boogeyman, and the grandaddy of them all — the island's curmudgeonly undead founder. But if horror isn't normally your thing, don't panic. Widow's Bay is spooky, but it's never punishing. The monsters may be trying to kill people, but the show remains far more interested in the town's oddballs and eccentricities, than traumatizing its audience. That's where the cast comes in. Matthew Rhys is terrific as Tom, a mayor who keeps discovering that local folklore wasn't folklore at all. Stephen Root is a blast as Wyck, the island's resident curse enthusiast. And Kate O'Flynn rounds things out as Patricia, the eccentric side-kick. If we're nitpicking, a couple episodes lost us — one going back in time, one reaching for the campier stuff. But Stephen Root comes barging in raving that they're all doomed, and it's hard to dwell on that for very long. Spooky, funny, and genuinely original — Widow's Bay delivers. Watch it.

Every once in a while, Netflix quietly drops a crime thriller that doesn't feel like it was assembled by an algorithm in their Hollywood boardroom. Legends is one of those rare surprises. The hook here is wild, and it happens to be true: Set in 1990s Britain during the rise of the heroin epidemic, the British government took ordinary paper-pushers and low-level customs officers, gave them zero field training, handed them fake IDs, and sent them undercover to infiltrate the country's most violent heroin cartels. Pulling its vibe straight from recession-hit Liverpool, the entire operation feels gloriously bootstrapped. A "legend" is the fake identity an operative has to maintain, where one forgotten detail can mean life or death. The tension comes from watching ordinary people realize they're getting a little too good at lying. Legends skips the glossy Netflix sheen and opts for film grain, tired faces, and ugly apartments. Nobody's explaining the plot twice for the audience. The show moves fast, trusts you to keep up, and ends up feeling far more tense because of it. The deeper they get, the more obvious it becomes that nobody involved really knows what they're doing. These aren't super spies. They're office workers trying to remember fake birthdays while standing next to people who'd happily kill them if they slip up. At a lean six episodes, it's a remarkably quick watch—and while it might not be the most memorable thing you'll see this year, it morphs into a total "just one more episode" trap that will have you looking at the clock at 2:00 AM wondering where your night went. It's not The Wire, but it's a very solid weekend watch. You could do a whole lot worse.

Steve Carell has made a second career out of playing middle-aged men quietly discovering that things did not go according to plan. So when HBO paired him with the Ted Lasso team for a campus dramedy, you could pretty much predict the vibe immediately: deeply watchable dad television. And that's exactly what the show is. Carell plays Greg, a guy who writes trashy airport thrillers, who rolls into a fancy New England college to check on his daughter after her professor husband (Phil Dunster) knocks up a student. Before long, Greg gets pulled into the university's orbit – teaching writing classes, hanging around hockey players half his age, and finding new ways to avoid dealing with his divorce. Warm. Easygoing. Mildly melancholy. Carell does his usual thing well — balancing secondhand embarrassment with that sad-dad charm that makes you root for him automatically. Dunster is just as good, playing a pompous academic whose confidence remains completely disconnected from the quality of his decisions. The issue is that the show hasn't decided what version of itself it wants to be. Half the time it's a grounded story about loneliness, aging, and trying to rebuild your life after public humiliation. The other half feels like somebody in the writers' room said, "There should probably be a scene where Steve Carell gets hammered at a college party and yells, 'Best day ever!!!'" The sincerity's there, but the show still feels like it's trying to figure itself out. It's comfort food anchored by one of the most lovable actors alive. You're never staying up until 2 AM binging it, but if you're looking for an easy watch, it's there for you.

We first found The Four Seasons on one of those hotel TVs during a wedding trip — the kind where Netflix is basically your only entertainment option between local news and $40 skin flicks. So, Netflix it was. We went scrolling, got fatigued, saw Steve Carell and Tina Fey on a poster, and figured worst case scenario: it'd be easy company for the night. Instead, the show snuck up on us. Adapted from the 1981 Alan Alda film, The Four Seasons follows a longtime group of friends whose seasonal vacations slowly become less relaxing and more hazardous. Divorces settle in. New girlfriends enter the group. Passive-aggressive dinners start creeping into every shared Airbnb. Everybody keeps insisting they're having fun while quietly unraveling a little inside. We started episodes thinking, "alright, one more before dinner," then found ourselves lingering in the hotel room debating whether to go downstairs or just order another bottle of wine and keep watching. Not because we were blown away or totally gripped, but because it was comfy. Like the warm grip of your duvet on a rainy morning. The longer you linger in it, the harder it becomes to leave the hotel. The seasonal structure really works because you can feel the friendships aging in real time. Little comments start landing harder. People pair off differently. Vacations start feeling like yearly check-ins nobody knows how to cancel. Steve Carell's storyline sneaks up on you the most. At first, his post-divorce "freedom" and younger-girlfriend flirts with sitcom territory. Then somewhere along the way, it turns into something honest about aging, loneliness, and realizing the second half of your life may look nothing like the one you pictured. Is The Four Seasons reinventing television? Not remotely. But it touches a specific feeling: being trapped in a beautiful vacation house with people you've loved for twenty years while slowly realizing that everyone changes. We were prepared for easy company. We got something a little better.

With this pulpy psychological thriller on Apple TV+, it's impossible to go a full episode without thinking about Scorsese and De Niro's disturbing 1991 film. That's what happens when Javier Bardem is this terrifying as the maniac Max Cady. For once, the comparison feels like a compliment. When a notorious killer walks out of prison after fourteen years, he begins a slow, methodical campaign of psychological warfare against defense attorney Anna Bowden (Amy Adams) and prosecutor Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson), the husband-and-wife legal team he blames for stealing his life. Cape Fear wants you uncomfortable before the title card even hits. A lumbering score plays over a camera-negative montage of Cady's eyes and a family barbecue, making a backyard cookout feel like the opening scene of a nightmare. It's not horror, technically, but it's deeply unsettling and packs real jump scares along the way. Trust us, we've jumped. Bardem plays Cady like a man who's spent years rehearsing exactly how unsettling he wants to be — a mosaic of eyeballs tattooed across his back, the Grim Reaper staring out from between his shoulder blades. Every scene with him feels like a held breath. You keep waiting for him to do the thing you know he's going to do, and the not-knowing-when is the whole engine of the show. But Cady isn't the only one with something to hide. Anna and Tom keep getting hairline cracks in their story — small enough you could miss them, big enough that you start wondering if "innocent victims" is the wrong way to be watching this. That's the show actually working: not "will Cady get them," but "do they deserve what's coming." It's not flawless — the troubled Bowden teenagers feel a bit tropey. But that's a minor leak in a show otherwise operating on a different frequency than anything else on TV right now. Watch it now, while it's still airing — and don't be shocked if this score climbs by the finale.