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I have been a science fiction fan ever since my older sister caught me trying to write a book report on a non-fiction book about Mars and took it away and put Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein in my hands. Now, in the era of streaming, the streaming wars, and the dominance of geek culture with so many SF movies and shows the question can be posed: which is the best service to subscribe to for science fiction?
To me, the answer is pretty plain: Apple TV.
While Paramount+ boasts pretty much the entire Star trek Franchise from the original series to the newest iterations, it’s really no deeper than Trek.
Apple TV has an impressive catalog of original and interesting SF. (In addition to even more beyond genre fiction such as Slow Horses and Bad Sisters.)
Here is a partial list of the SF you can find on Apple’s streaming service. I have bolded the ones that I have watched and as you can see the unwatched outnumber the viewed.
- For All Mankind
- Silo
- Foundation
- Severance
- Dark Matter
- Invasion
- See
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
- Hello Tomorrow!
- Constellation
- Amazing Stories
- Brain
- Sunny
- The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
- Circuit Breakers
- Murderbot
- Pluribus
Of the six shows that I watched, and I watched at least the entire first season for all of them, only one did not work for me and left me cold and uninterested in continuing, Silo. While it had a cast that I enjoyed and an intriguing concept there were world building issues that I simply could not get past to suspend my disbelief. The underground world of the show is simply not run with the absolute need to recycle everything, most of all biological material, that such a system would demand. All the other programs have worked at levels from simply enjoyable to shows that I love. Foundation, while diverging significantly from the source materials, source materials I found too dry to hold my interest, has been forking fantastic. Murderbot hewed much closer to the novels and managed to capture the inner monolog that is so essential to the property’s comedic tone. It took me a little longer to get into Severance. The split nature of the characters, I suspect, created an emotional distance, but once past that and especially once the big reveal of season one was deployed, I was hooked. Monarch was just monstrously fun and I cannot wait to see where Gilligan takes Pluribus.
I initially enrolled with Apple TV because a package deal with Apple music, storage, and TV cost less than the satellite radio services in my car, but now you can have my Apple TV when you pry the remote from my cold frozen fingers.
