Séamas O'Reilly: Apple TV+ has Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks and God, but is anybody watching?

Irish Times

17-07-2025

Apple TV+
occupies an odd spot in the streaming world. Its library of original films has garnered dozens of
Oscar
nominations for the likes of
Killers of the Flower Moon
,
Napoleon
and 2021 Best Picture winner
CODA
, while its TV content includes hits such as
Severance
, Slow Horses and
Ted Lasso
. But it's also fair to say that its full roster is less heralded than those of
Netflix
and
Amazon
– or even
Paramount+
.
This is, I would argue, a shame, since Apple TV+ has hours of very good programming which, sometimes, it feels like nobody's watching. No other platform has the same talent for producing shows that have multiple series, five-star reviews, casts that appear to include
Julia Roberts
,
Tom Hanks
, the Statue of Liberty and God – and yet still draw a resounding blank if you bring them up over pints. Do I know a couple of people who share my love of Silo and For All Mankind? Yes. Do I know three? No.
Let's be honest. Some of their shows sound made up. Consider a drama like Shrinking, in which Jason Segel and
the
Harrison Ford have played crotchety psychotherapists for two whole series. You'd have heard if that was real, wouldn't you?
What about See, a three-season
Jason Momoa
-fronted sci-fi about a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is blind? Or Roundabout, a spy thriller in which
Idris Elba
and
Helen Mirren
navigate gridlock traffic during a London terror attack. Or what about
Stick
, an Owen Wilson comedy about a washed-up former golf pro with a wisecracking caddie played by Marc Maron? Do any of those sound real to you? I mean, yes, I did make one of them up – but I'm willing to bet you don't know which. In fact, if I were to revisit this paragraph a year from now, I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't remember myself.
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The return of
Foundation (Apple TV+)
, therefore, offers me a great opportunity to trumpet what Apple does best. Loosely based on Isaac Asimov's seminal novel series,
Foundation takes place in a far-flung future
in which space is ruled by a 'genetic dynasty' battling against the Foundation, a splinter movement inspired by enigmatic mathematician Hari Seldon (a typically superb Jared Harris).
In the show's first series, we learned that his calculations predicted the end of the dynasty's reign, earning him exile from the empire, and attracting the brilliant young mind Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobel, who should be in more things) to join him in his work.
The empire's dynasty is genetic in the sense that it's administered by a triumvirate of clones, each at a different stage of life: the presiding emperor in his prime years, Brother Day (Lee Pace, delivering a series of scenery-chewing masterclasses), a younger clone-in-training, Brother Dawn (played by a capable and sprightly Cassian Bilton), and an elder clone named Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann, who is thankfully given lots to do in this latest series).
Marriage for them is forbidden, so the imperial line is continued via a rotation of euthanising Brother Dusk, so that a new Brother Dawn can be produced. The result is a remarkably clean storytelling engine for examining intergenerational conflict, which provides the additional benefit of allowing the same actors to reprise different iterations of themselves, centuries apart.
Each series, after all, restarts with a substantial time jump, meaning almost every face you meet will be new, barring the emperors, as well as Gaal Dornick, and Hari Seldon, who get cryo-sleep treatment and/or live on as mental projections of themselves. In this latest series, each seems poised to join forces with the others to thwart a new enemy: a psychic pirate named the Mule who can bend whole planets to his will.
Foundation: Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin, Jared Harris as Hari Seldon and Lou Llobell as Gaal Dornick. Photograph: Helen Sloan/Apple TV+
But sure lookit, I'm getting ahead of myself. Foundation is the kind of knotty science fiction that's best described as loosely as possible so that new entrants to the cult can experience its labyrinthine constructions for themselves. The balance such storytelling must strike is, after all, impossibly delicate. Too much exposition and it becomes a treacly mire; too much action and it becomes inscrutable tosh.
Some part of me yearns for nothing more than the slow machinations and devious politicking – what I'd call Wolf Hall in space – but, shorn of the splash and spectacle of technology and plottier elements, such a show could feel – even to a hardened dork such as I – like homework.
[
Foundation: Set phasers to Overambitious – season two is like Game of Thrones on psychedelics
Opens in new window
]
The fact that Foundation manages to avoid either trap is, in my opinion, more impressive than its sumptuous futuristic visuals, canny acting or immense feats of world-building. It is spectacular entertainment, one which marries the palace intrigue of Game Of Thrones with the eye-catching bombast of Denis Villeneuve's Dune films. This is genre storytelling at its most rich and deep, and you should simply watch it now. Even just three of you. Please. So I'll finally have someone to discuss it with.
I hold similar hopes for my other favourite science fiction show of 2025, the comedy-drama
Murderbot (Apple TV+)
, which last week concluded its first series on the platform, just as Foundation's third began. Alexander Skarsgård plays the titular homicidal android, a security unit dispatched to help humans on the off-world mining colonies and science missions which pepper the series' universe.
Designed to be an unthinking automaton, he's hacked his programming to grant himself free will, and must now conceal this from his new clients, a hippyish crew of environmental scientists, working on commission for an evil, galaxy-spanning corporation.
Alexander Skarsgård in Murderbot
While (mostly) wishing them no harm, he finds himself affronted by their puny human failings, and perturbed by their constant attempts to share and connect with him. Instead, he indulges his true passions: constantly checking the perimeter to escape eye contact with his human charges, and scouring the galaxy's premium-quality media uplinks so he can download untold gigabytes of his favourite spacefaring soap operas.
Murderbot began as a series of Hugo Award-winning novellas by Martha Wells, and the character has long been embraced by neurodiverse readers as a wry and loving commentary on their own cohort: awkward, perhaps, when it comes to real-life matters of the heart, but deeply obsessed with such themes in fiction.
His addiction to schmaltzy 'premium content' – rendered, with hammy brio, throughout the series in snippets starring John Cho and 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer – begins as a joyously meta character quirk, before becoming a focal plot point, and a window into his own, tentatively human, emotional universe.
All of which says nothing about the show's wider narrative of corporate spycraft, capitalist hegemony, workplace relationships, and the most astute and hilarious commentary on supposedly right-on people working within evil systems that you'll find anywhere in contemporary television.
Murderbot is that best of things: a comment on genre which also typifies said genre's best tropes. It's smart-as-a-tack pulp that loves its characters, and the conventions they represent, while also pulling off enough novel twists and turns that its wonderfully crafted fake world hums with chaotic life.
It is some of the funniest science fiction – and most dramatically gripping comedy – available today. It may not star Harrison Ford, or even the Statue of Liberty, but if you find yourself scouring the galaxy's premium-quality media uplinks, you have my strongest recommendation to give it a chance.