Apple TV+ made a big genre investment and it’s finally paying off

Severance is back for its long-awaited second season on Apple TV+. The sci-fi drama by director Ben Stiller has earned a large audience of loyal fans, and heaps of critical praise for its premise about a technology that can surgically split a person’s mind in two between work and home life — and its incredible execution.

But as people flock to Apple TV+ to check out the show, many are also discovering the streaming service has got one of the richest libraries of original sci-fi dramas on television. Given the streamer’s fairly small library, the list of sci-fi shows available on the platform is both impressively large, wide-ranging, and high-quality. Those include popular series like Silo, For All Mankind, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, along with under-seen gems like Dark Matter and Shining Girls.

How Apple TV+ became the home of great sci-fi

Big budgets and even bigger imagination

Apple TV+

Price

$9.99 per month

Free trial

7 day free trial and 3 months free if you buy an Apple device

Simultaneous streams

6

# of profiles

6

Originals

Yes

Live TV:

Limited (There are live sports and some add-on channels offer live TV)

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Apple TV+ launched on November 1, 2019, with three shows. The splashiest was The Morning Show, a backroom drama about the inner workings of a network morning show, starring A-listers Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. At the same time, the streamer debuted two science fiction shows. There was the post-apocalyptic See, starring Jason Momoa, set in a future when humanity has lost its sense of sight. Then there was For All Mankind, an alternate history series imaging what the world would have looked like if the Soviet Union landed on the Moon before the United States, and the space race never ended.

While none of the shows were met with exceptional reviews at the start, For All Mankind emerged as one of the best loved series on Apple TV+, particularly as subsequent seasons advanced through the decades to depict an alternate present in which humans have set up bases on Mars. The more the show embraced its sci-fi nature, the better it got. And even See, which was mostly dismissed in the beginning, found an audience of fans and produced three seasons.

From there, it was off to the races, with shows like the Steven Spielberg-produced sci-fi anthology Amazing Stories premiering in spring 2020, as well as the Isaac Asimov adaptation Foundation and alien drama Invasion debuting later that year.

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The Severance factor

Sci-fi takes a leap with the best show on TV

Apple TV+

Apple TV+ took its sci-fi offerings to another level in 2022, with the debut of its more original series, Severance. Created by writer Dan Erickson, and executive-produced and largely directed by Ben Stiller, the show stars Adam Scott as a worker who has agreed to have a chip inserted into his brain, splitting his work memories from his non-work memories. The process, known as severance, effectively creates two unique persons within one body, all for the sake of a job whose purpose is described only as, “mysterious and important.”

Severance was acclaimed on release for its excellent character work, mystery-box plotting, and retro-future visual style and production design. Its incredible first season cliffhanger also kept fans waiting with eager anticipation for the show’s continuation. Due to delays related to the recent Hollywood writers and actors strikes, as well as other production issues, the second season took nearly three years to arrive, finally premiering on January 17, 2025. Thankfully, fans and critics have largely agreed the wait for season 2 was worth it, and the show has been getting more attention than ever, becoming Apple TV+’s sci-fi calling card.

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Sci-fi for everyone

There’s plenty more to discover

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If, for some reason, Severance doesn’t capture someone’s attention, Apple TV+ has plenty of other sci-fi shows on offer that might do the trick. Silo, for example, is a series based on the novels by Hugh Howey, about a post-apocalyptic underground city and the rebels fighting to learn the truth about how and why their silo came to be. Dark Matter, starring Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, and Alice Braga, goes deep into alternate reality storytelling, and a man fights to stop an alternate version of himself from stealing his life.

There’s Hello Tomorrow!, a sci-fi comedy-drama about a huckster, played by Billy Crudup, who is fraudulently selling timeshares on the moon. Shining Girls, which is closer to a supernatural thriller with some time travel elements, stars Elisabeth Moss as a newspaper archivist searching for the man who attacked her a year earlier before he kills more women.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, is a big-budget spin-off from the Godzilla vs. Kong universe of blockbuster movies known as the Monsterverse. Sunny is a Japan-set sci-fi comedy-mystery starring Rashida Jones and a robot, who try to uncover the secrets left behind by her husband, who seemingly died in a plane crash along with their son. Dr. Brain is a Korean-language show from acclaimed director Kim Jee-woon about a scientist hacking into dead people’s brains in order to understand how his family was killed.

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The place for sci-fi

All the best shows, and even more to come

Apple TV+

For sci-fi fans, there are a lot of offerings on all the streaming services, but none are better or more consistent than Apple TV+. The shows they greenlight tend to have interesting, unique concepts, with big budgets to bring their sci-fi worlds to life, and big stars to anchor the action and mystery. From Severance to For All Mankind, the service is a real treasure trove, and they show no signs of slowing down, either.

New seasons of many of the shows are on the way, and there are new shows still to come. Apple is currently at work on an adaptation of William Gibson’s iconic Neuromancer. Breaking Bad creator and X-Files alum Vince Gilligan is currently filming a mysterious new sci-fi project. Murderbot is another upcoming sci-fi series, starring Alexander Skarsgård, about a sentient security android. Finally, there’s a spin-off of For All Mankind coming as well, Star City, which follows the Soviet side of the story. Apple TV+ really is a sci-fi lover’s dream.

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